The Heart of Saturday Night
by A.Diamond
Summary: Officer Dean Winchester almost feels at home in Greenwood, WA after a lifetime of wandering. The skeletons of his past don't rattle him into restlessness anymore. But when both a rash of drug-related crimes and a hot paramedic start getting too close for comfort, it might be time to move on once again.
1. The Ghosts of Saturday Night

Written for the SPN AU Big Bang. Please take the time to check the art by lostloona on tumblr (post 156360174311).

 **Warnings:** Referenced drug use, past abuse, past non/dub-con and threats of rape, cheating, minor character death, torture.

* * *

Living and working in Greenwood, Washington gave Dean a sense of satisfaction that he couldn't remember feeling before. He'd done bustling metropolises, he'd done small towns, he'd done so rural his best conversation was the nearest cow. Greenwood was a city, not huge, but not small. Lots of businesses, mostly middle-class residents. As an officer with Greenwood PD, he dealt mostly with property crime, which was a relief.

Property crime and a reasonable amount of drugs, but not the heavy, violent stuff. Yeah, there was some meth, but not made there. The local stuff came from out in the unincorporated county area, the sheriff's jurisdiction, and the good stuff made its way from all the way over the mountains. For the most part, it was heroin; heroin was a hell of a drug and it fucked people up, but it didn't make them kill people. It made them kill themselves, and also steal from people. So, property crime. There was also a lot of marijuana, which—okay, had been legalized, but not for sixteen-year-olds sitting in school parking lots getting ready to drive home.

Which was just one of many reasons Dean was never going put in for School Resource Officer. It wasn't that he didn't like kids; rather, he did and he wanted to keep it that way. Besides, he knew Jo was going to apply, and she'd be awesome. She'd be a sergeant before too long, and he would eat his badge if she didn't go on to become the youngest commander GPD ever had. She'd be awesome at that, too. Promotion was at least a few years off, though, so for the time being she'd be great with the kids. And their parents. Helicopter parents gave him heartburn, and he counted down the (many) days until summer ended because then at least half the time when parents couldn't handle being parents they'd pass it off to the teachers instead of calling him.

As if on cue, he rolled past the Tran house. Kevin paused from forcing a reel mower across the drying grass to wave and Dean grinned as he nodded in reply. Kevin was one of the good ones, who'd done ride-alongs and job shadows with various members of the department including Dean before deciding law enforcement wasn't for him. But he'd spent enough time around for Dean to get to know him and his mom, Linda, who might be a bit of a tiger mom but had done pretty damn well for a working single parent.

Better than Dean's own father had ever done after his mom's death, that was for sure. But the late Mr. Tran had died a hero in combat, and while he didn't doubt it had been hard on Linda, it was still a little different than the murder and arson that had changed Dean's family forever.

Then the alert tones came over the radio and he snapped to attention, turning his laptop for a better view as he pulled up the new call's info and skimmed it as he listened. "One-lincoln-nine-three, one-david-six-five, respond with EMS to Washington Park, 20341 Greenwood Avenue for a thirty-one-year-old male overdosing on heroin, unconscious, unknown breathing. Washington Park, 20341 Greenwood."

"Ninety-three en route, code three," he responded, even as he flipped on his lights and wailing siren, speeding down the residential streets towards the park. It had been a few weeks, less than a month, since he'd run code to a call. Despite his anticipation when he first applied so many years, so many agencies ago, he didn't particularly enjoy it. It was all right on the freeway, with uninterrupted miles and most people smart enough to move to the right, or even out in the pastoral stretches of farmland without a soul to be seen for an hour and wide dirt shoulders if he needed to get around something in a hurry, but here in the city it meant he had to slow down every three seconds or risk killing or being killed by some soccer mom too distracted on her smartphone to notice him plowing through an intersection.

He heard his laptop chirp with updates and got antsy when the information wasn't immediately shared over the radio. The dispatchers screened the info and would broadcast what they thought he really needed to know, but he wanted to know everything. He didn't like not having all the details, having to trust someone else's judgment of the situation, but he couldn't look at his screen while hurtling 80 miles an hour through kidzone on a summer morning.

He was at the park before anything else came out, and the guy stumbling towards him, waving wildly, was unsurprisingly familiar: transient addict, frequent police contact, in and out of jail, always with his best buddy. "Ninety-three to radio, I'm arrived and getting flagged down by Roy McLeach. We're probably looking for Walter Sykes. Where is he, Roy?" he called as he got out of the car. The man was a wreck, all cheekbones and pockmarks and sunken eyes, crying and yelling to help, hurry up, come on. Roy sank down, trying to collapse to the sidewalk but Dean caught him by the arm, pulled him up, demanding, "Where is he, Roy? Show me where he is."

He had to repeat himself a few more times, half-dragging Roy towards the park, but after a few missteps the addict led him towards a stand of trees and they found Walt. He was on the ground, his skin was blue, and if he was breathing at all it was too shallow to count for anything. Dean heard sirens but fuck, they were just too far off, so he quickly relayed their location—about 100 yards east of the entrance—and dropped to his knees to start CPR.

Roy was still yelling as he counted out chest compressions— _one, two, three, four, five_ —and Dean really wanted him to shut the fuck up— _six, seven, eight, nine, ten_ —but he couldn't let himself get distracted— _eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen_ —and then Jo was beside him, pulling Roy away— _sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty_ —and the other sirens were still approaching, not there yet, goddamnit— _twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five_ —and Jo was shouting to someone, something about showing aid where they are— _twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty_ —and he pulled his hands away, leaning forward over the body to try and breathe life back into it. Even through the stale plastic of the mouth shield he could smell Walt's rotting breath, and the combination of the two almost made him gag, but he got two lungfuls in and went back to shoving at the motionless sternum beneath him.

Then there was someone else next to him, crouched down and gently pushing him away. He rocked back and let Jo help him up so the paramedic, finally there, could take over with a breathing bag while another readied a syringe of naloxone, an opioid antagonist with a nasal spray diffuser. There was a long moment of silence, or at least a moment where Dean didn't register anything else going on in the world, and then Walt took an agonizing, gasping breath. Then another, easier this time, and his eyes started to flutter open.

"Shit, it's amazing every time. We really gotta see about getting that stuff in our cars," Jo said quietly, and Dean nodded.

Roy still stood there looking lost, but his breathing had evened out and he wasn't shaking so much anymore, so Dean pulled him aside to get his story. He and Walt shot up last night, Roy said, and when he woke up Walt was like this. Walt prepped his own hit, Roy didn't know how much he took. He didn't know if Walt woke up and took more, or something else, but he didn't have anything left. He didn't need any medical attention himself, thank you very much, he was just peachy.

Dean was a skeptic. Part of it came with the job, but mostly it was just how he'd always been. So with a bit of harassment, he got Roy to give up a couple half-empty bottles of morphine that apparently didn't count as 'anything' because they weren't heroin. He was about to set in with a halfhearted lecture that they both knew would be useless when he actually stopped to look at the vials he was handed. Waving the relieved addict off, he asked Jo, "Since when does RRE make drugs?"

She looked as confused as he was and held a hand out for the stash: two small glass vials marked with blue and white labels proclaiming them products of Wellman, Inc. But right at the bottom corner, easy to miss, were three tiny letters, the logo of Richard Roman Enterprises.

RRE was _the_ business of Greenwood. It owned most of the property north of downtown, had a workforce equivalent to nearly three-quarters of the city's population (and that was just locally, there were smaller outposts around the country), and had its hand in everything from agriculture to computing to biotech—and now, apparently, pharmaceuticals.

The man himself, Richard "Call Me Dick" Roman, gave Dean the creeps. He appeared in almost every RRE ad, smiling like a politician and selling the American Dream via genetically modified tomatoes and robotic diagnostics to replace "Tired, overworked, error-prone" human doctors. GPD's detectives kept finding him, or at least his company, on the sidelines of missing persons and a handful of suicides and one particularly nasty arson. Nothing had ever stuck, of course. Dean doubted anything ever would.

"News to me," Jo said, slipping the bottles into an evidence bag. "It must be recent, at least this stuff hitting the streets, if we haven't heard about it from Ash and his mullet squad. They'll probably be pissed we came across it first."

The narcotics division—the name had stuck, unofficially, even though they were now "Special Projects" and also took cases involving gang involvement, organized property crime, and fraud—did a lot of undercover work, and as a result, they pretty much all looked and dressed like varying degrees of frat boy. Still, they were usually on top of their shit, so if they missed this it was either new, like Jo said, or something bigger was going on. Or, the itchy feeling in Dean's chest worried, both.

The aid crew was a whirlwind of activity throughout it all, eventually ending with Walt in the back of the EMS rig with one paramedic, a shorter guy, poking at him and carrying on a mostly one-sided conversation. His partner walked back towards where Dean and Jo now stood together, scribbling on a large metal clipboard, and as he got closer Dean started to recognize the messy brown hair and slightly stiff shoulders. Then the man looked up, blue eyes locking on Dean, and he hesitated in his steps, tilting his head ever-so-slightly. He shook it off almost instantly, finishing his journey to the two officers with his gaze back on his work.

"Patient is fully conscious, no fractures from CPR, declining transport to the hospital," he informed them without preamble, then glanced between Jo and Dean. "Who do I put down as in charge?" His voice was expectedly low and dusky, and Dean almost— _almost_ —felt himself burn with smoky recollections.

Instead, he stepped forward and stuck out a hand. "Winchester, badge 3993. Dean," he said, because he was pretty sure there was no other way to professionally introduce himself to the guy whose dick he'd had in his mouth two nights ago and whose name he didn't know. The man left him hanging for long seconds as he recorded the information, then thoughtfully slid his pen into the clipboard and accepted the handshake.

"Castiel Novak."

His hand was warm and a little rough. Dean knew that hand intimately. That hand knew _Dean_ intimately. He was getting distracted again.

Castiel turned to Jo, who offered a friendly wave and, "Jo Harvelle," but nothing else. She was watching Dean through narrowed eyes and when he frowned a question at her, she flitted her scrutiny to Castiel and back and fucking _smirked_ at him. Dean very professionally did not shit himself.

The paramedic either missed or ignored the exchange, attention returned to his form as he asked, "Will you need copies of our report?"

"Yeah. Whenever it's done, no rush. They don't tend to get on us about paperwork unless it's been over a week." He studied Castiel. Now that he didn't have to worry about tipping Jo off (though he really wished she weren't so damn observant), he took advantage of the man's focus to drink in details he'd had to skim over before. The dark hair stuck out in even more chaotic directions than it had at the bar that night; had he tried to tame it, to look respectable, Dean wondered, only to have it fight back to this natural state? Or did he know how incredibly sexy the disheveled look made him? It was the hair that had grabbed Dean's attention first, stark against the collar of a white dress shirt with the sleeves pushed up.

He'd told himself, when he went out on Saturday, that he wasn't looking to go home with anyone—just enjoying a night off. But then he went to Panthers instead of the Roadhouse, and no one really went to Panthers without certain expectations, or at least hopes. He tried to pretend it was because Panthers was in Seattle and he didn't like drinking where he policed, especially on busy weekends, and it wasn't entirely a lie. He'd encountered more than one disgruntled citizen at the Roadhouse recognizing him from his day job, and even though Ellen's sympathies lay with her late husband's department, she would kick his ass if he stirred up any more trouble in her bar. But there were hundreds of other bars in the neighboring city, and he still chose that one.

Okay, to be fair, Dean _hadn't_ gone home with anyone. He had bought a hot guy—Castiel—a drink, bought himself a drink, bought a few more drinks, and then shamelessly stumbled down the street to a motel. He didn't remember much about the room, but in the nights since he'd had some pretty good alone time with memories of intense blue eyes, darkly whispered desires, and the strong, hard body currently hidden under the crisp white shirt and black slacks of the Medic One uniform.

Then he realized Castiel was staring back at him expectantly. "Sorry, what?" he asked, pretty sure he wasn't imagining the twitch at the corner of the other man's mouth.

Jo, always happy to reprise her role as a terrible person who took absolutely no pity on him, answered the unknown inquiry with a laughing, "Yeah, all the time," and didn't elaborate or explain in any way. Dean made a mental note to tape a hot pink teddy bear to the back of her patrol car sometime this week; it had taken her two days to notice the cut-out Justin Bieber head he'd stuck in the rear windshield last time.

Before he could demand to know what they were talking about, the other paramedic hollered, "Cas!" from halfway across the park. They all turned to watch him jog closer, brandishing his hand like a flag over his head. "Bro! Come on! If those assholes eat all the pie before we get back, you're making me more."

Castiel regarded them each in turn, nodding amicably. "Duty calls," he intoned, gravely but with the barest hint of a smile.

That left Dean alone with Jo, steadfastly not looking at her because he knew exactly what sort of smug bullshit would be all over her face. He held out for over a minute, until: "So, did he make you any pie?" She barely finished the question before her giggles turned into very unladylike snorts.

"Fuck you, Joanna Beth!" He made sure there was no one standing around recording them with a phone before he smacked her on the arm. "How the fuck could you tell?"

"Oh please, you're the single most obvious son of a bitch I've ever met. You were practically drooling, which, fair enough. He's a sexy man. But he clearly recognized you, and you were both awkward and silent about it! If you were going for subtle, that's not the way to do it. We meet plenty of guys from Greenwood Fire, no big deal."

He cursed again, running a hand back and forth through his short hair in irritation, then nodded towards their parked cars and they started walking. "I didn't know he was with Fire, okay? Especially not in our city. He was just a guy at a bar, you know? A bar in _Seattle_."

She held up her hands in surrender. "Hey, I'm not judging. You know we don't do that Crips vs Bloods, Police-Fire bullshit here." She paused, thoughtful for a moment. "Though I am a Jet all the way," she added with a snap and a cheeky grin. She ducked under his next attempt at a swing and stuck her tongue out at him.

They were almost back to the sidewalk when she slowed, her voice softening. "You gonna see him again?"

Dean shut his eyes, clenching a fist and just barely holding back a groan. His patchwork family, ragged as it was, was increasingly fixated on his aging bachelorhood. If it wasn't his brother Sammy with his disgustingly adorable fiancée and his desire for Dean to "Just let someone in for once, stop trying to go through life alone," then it was Ellen insisting she and Bobby are overdue grandkids, and his would do just fine.

The worst was when it came from Jo, though, because of her awkward crush that neither of them would ever acknowledge even under torture. She was family to him, always would be; dad's best friend's step daughter was just a complicated form of little sister, and that meant more to him than any girlfriend ever would.

"I dunno," he hedged, not entirely dishonestly. It hadn't seemed to be a possibility before now, given that he hadn't even known the guy's name, much less his phone number. Yeah, Dean was that easy—he wasn't exactly _proud_ of it, but it wasn't like he felt the least bit of shame, either. "I mean, I'm glad he's not a felon," and they both shuddered at that memory, because Jo had been the one to arrest Ava, who turned out to have three assaults and an arson on her record, the night she followed Dean home from a tryst and broke three of his apartment's four windows. "And he seems like a good guy. I'm just not really looking for anything right now, you know?"

"But...?" She knew him well enough to hear the slight catch of hesitation.

He glanced at her, saw the smirk back in place, and decided it wasn't too cruel. "But goddamn. It was great. He was... intense."

"I always knew the Station Six guys were kinky."

"Not like that," Dean protested, but without much vehemence. "Just, I dunno. Focus. I mean, you saw him—that's what he was like then, too. All that attention concentrated on—" He broke off, shrugging away the awkward feeling crawling across his shoulders. "Well, you get it. I'm not opposed to doing it again, is what I'm saying."

Dean was back in his car, driving around aimlessly for nearly an hour before he got sent on another call, a smashed car window with a missing purse at someone's house—and he would've had a lot less to do with his day if the overly trusting ( _naive_ ) citizens of Greenwood would stop leaving their crap in their cars and then acting like it's a surprise that something bad happened.

Only a block or two away, the radio squawked again. "One-lincoln-nine-three, can you call dispatch?"

Dean copied and pulled out his phone, hitting the first speed-dial and not even wincing when greeted by the slightly shrill voice of Becky, the new, overly excitable trainee. "Hey, it's Dean. What's up?"

"So, we've got this guy downstairs, he says he's from Medic Five and has a report for you. I tried to tell him to just give it to the Records desk but he's insisting he needs to give it to you personally. That's weird, right? I checked with Frank down in Records and he says the guy's in uniform, but seems kinda weird. You want us to see if someone can grab it for you, since you're on the way to that car prowl?"

Dean blew out a sigh, assessing the morning traffic ahead of him. It would take him twenty minutes to get to the house anyway, and the woman said she didn't have anywhere to be. Plus, he was closer to the station. Plus, it sounded more interesting than an hour of paperwork for yet another property crime that, honestly, they'd probably never resolve anyway. Plus, he was pretty sure he wanted to see this guy again. "Nah, leave this assigned and I'll be en route to the lobby."

"Okay!" Becky chirped, cheerful as always. "Do you want a back, just to be sure?"

"Negative, I think I can take a medic in a fight," he chuckled. "Just because they spend most of their shift getting paid to work out doesn't mean they can do anything useful with it."

"Recorded line, Dean," another voice broke in—Pamela, Becky's trainer. Of course she was listening in. "Public record. This is why you can't be an FTO."

"I can't be an FTO because I'm too awesome," he retorted. Not that he'd ever stuck around anywhere long enough to be certified as a training officer. "The trainees would know they can never live up to me and wash out." The phone disconnected, and he knew it wasn't Becky's doing.

When he got back to the station, he saw Castiel waiting patiently in one of the department's unreasonably comfortable lobby chairs, flipping through a stack of papers. He stood as Dean approached, shuffling the files into order and offering his hand. "Officer Winchester," he greeted him.

It was Dean's turn to make the handshake awkward, waiting a beat too long to accept as he stared at it because, well, he kinda thought they were past this part. "You can really just call me Dean," he said as he finally gripped it.

Castiel seemed to consider this, then nodded. "Very well, Dean." He fell silent.

He stayed silent.

"Aaaand I can call you... Castiel?" Dean prompted eventually. "Or, the short guy said Cas?"

"Yes," the paramedic said with a slight crease in his brow. "I answer to either of those. But I really don't believe Gabriel would approve—"

Cas was cut off by a slightly staticy, "One-lincoln-nine-three, status check?"

Dean frowned in annoyance, but stepped back slightly and confirmed everything was fine with a "Ninety-three, code four," before returning his attention to the man before him. Cas's head tilted slightly as he looked around the lobby, pointedly taking in the occupied Records desk and Charlie, the evidence tech, talking to someone nearby. Then he looked at his watch, quirked an eyebrow, and turned his face back up to Dean, who grinned.

"They think you're weird," he explained. "Probably stalking me. All it would take is five minutes to drag me off into the bushes and have your way with me." No one was close enough to overhear them, but he still lowered his voice because Dean Winchester was a professional, goddamn it, and professional police officers do not flirt on duty, especially not with the other night's hot one-night stand from Fire.

"I recall it taking longer than five minutes," Cas commented. His face was bland and his voice solemn, but Dean was eighty percent sure that the other night's hot one-night stand from Fire was flirting back. "In any case, you're the one with handcuffs." One hundred percent chance: paramedic wanted back in his pants.

Swallowing past his dry mouth, Dean risked a step closer. The distance between them was still publicly acceptable—a little nearer to friendly than officially detached, but not inappropriate if anyone gave them a second glance. He let his register drop, brushing just to the border of suggestion, meticulously dragging his eyes down Castiel's body, looking back up into those blue eyes and asking, "You have something for me?"

Before Cas could respond, his own radio emitted three brief, loud tones. He pushed the paperwork at Dean without a word, smiling tightly, and turned to jog out of the lobby even as Dean heard the robotic voice of the auto locution summoning Medic Five to a cardiac arrest just south of the city.

It had been going so well, too. Holding in a regretful curse, Dean slouched his way to the report writing office. He kicked up his feet on the desk and cushioned his head in his hands, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes as he tried to come up with an excuse to drop by the fire station in the next few days. Ultimately, he gave up the exercise; aside from the creepiness factor, he realized that he didn't even know what kind of schedule paramedics worked, and he would hate to deal with the awkwardness of showing up only to find those two firefighters he'd met before from Station 6. He didn't remember names, but they had had absolutely no sense of humor.

As he settled in to actually working, he sorted the forms into the order he liked in his reports, only to find a blank duplicate of the patient info page. He crumpled it with a shrug, about to try for a three-point shot into the trash when he noticed a flash of dark blue pen showing through from the back of the paper. Flattening it to look, Dean couldn't help but grin.

The guy's handwriting was precisely chaotic, all hard angles and capital letters and spacing so inconsistent it took him three tries to make sense of the words: _OFF DUTY 0600 WED. 2 ON 6 OFF._ And a phone number.

He didn't call until after work on Wednesday. He didn't want to bother Cas while he was on shift, and waiting until the evening gave him time to crash. The delay also gave Dean time to figure out what he actually wanted to say. Castiel was obviously interested in something, but the big question was, what?

On Saturday night, both of their intentions had been pretty clear. An anonymous quickie (not _that_ quick) really didn't scream, 'Looking for a long-term monogamous commitment.' But now? He knew Dean's name, he knew where Dean worked, he'd even started meeting the family, though Dean didn't see any reason Cas needed to know that. Worse, they were inevitably going to run into each other again, and if Cas wanted something Dean wasn't offering, it would only be downhill on Awkward Mountain from there.

Or what if they did want the same sort of no-strings arrangement and it went sour after that? They both worked for the city; he might be digging himself into some sort of sexual harassment lawsuit. Dean's life was full of questionable choices and even worse bedmates, but this might end up being the stupidest thing he'd ever done.

He sat in the station parking lot and forced the call through before he could talk himself out of it.

"So, what are we doing here?" he asked when a gravelly voice answered.

There was a pause, then, "Hello, Dean."

"Hey. So. Got your number. I just finished my shift, figured you'd be rested by now. Now that we're, uh, properly introduced and likely to run into each other, seems like we ought to have a conversation."

"I agree, which is one of the main reasons I left you my information."

For some reason, Dean didn't find that entirely reassuring. "Not the only reason?"

"Let me be clear: I have no expectations here, Dean. We met at a bar, went to a motel, and I didn't even know your name. I'm not attempting to force you into anything. However, I enjoyed myself immensely the other night, and I hope you did as well. We're consenting adults with difficult jobs and messy schedules and at least reasonable sexual compatibility. I see no reason not to take advantage of the circumstances, and it doesn't have to be anything more than that."

Between the simple logic and Castiel's straightforward manner, this was starting to sound like the least complicated hookup Dean had ever had, instead of the messiest as he'd been dreading. "That's about where I'm at," he agreed. "And yeah, not gonna lie, we were pretty awesome together."

Cas's chuckle was more exhaled than vocalized, but it still carried across the line. "If you think that was awesome," he rumbled dryly, "Imagine us sober with the entire night at our disposal."

"We won't have to imagine if you're free tonight," Dean said, warmth already pulsing through his core in anticipation.

"You just got off shift, you're not too tired?"

"For hitting up bars and chatting up possibles, sure. But you should know, if we're gonna give this a go, that I'm never too tired for a sure thing."

"I'm actually away from home and my car at the moment. It's not anything I don't mind interrupting, but unless you live near Smith-Franklin park, we may have to wait an hour until I can walk home."

"SF's pretty close to the station, you know. I could pick you up?"

"I don't wish to impose."

"No problem, man, I got nowhere to be."

"I'll wait in the east lot, then. And Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"You may consider me a sure thing."

They ended up walking in the park together, because it was a gorgeous summer evening and Dean had been stuck in his car going back and forth on mail theft and credit card fraud all day. They didn't talk much as they wandered the walking paths, but it was companionable, not romantic. There were no longing looks or carefully orchestrated brushes of hands, just two dudes enjoying nature.

It was past time for dinner by the time they got back to Dean's Impala, but since neither of them was hungry and it wasn't like this was a date, Cas just directed them toward his house.

As soon as the door shut behind them, Cas pulled Dean towards him and backed into the wall. Though the kiss was soft and languid, he wasted no time unfastening Dean's pants and teasing a hand inside. Dean could feel the heat in his face as fingers brushed promises against him, and he tugged up Cas's tucked-in shirt, slid under it because he needed to be touching the man _._

"Oh fucking hell!" came a complaint from behind him, oddly accented and dripping with distaste.

Dean, flush deepening now from embarrassment, tried to pull away, but Cas kept both hands firmly planted even as he dropped his head back against the wall to glare at the interloper Dean still couldn't see. "Balthazar," he growled, "What are you doing in my house?"

"Safeguarding your virtue, apparently. That's a copper's dick you've got your hand on, Cassie. Whatever would your boys at the firehouse think?"

Deflating with an irritated sigh, Cas worked to re-zip and re-button Dean's jeans. His fingers moved slowly and deliberately, stilling in place when he finished and Dean reached down to grab them with his own. He'd put a few things together and he was pretty sure he'd figured out who was behind him, and he really, _really_ wanted to be wrong, because it added up to a snarky douche of an art gallery owner who always seemed to get out of his misdemeanor possession charges while clearly being involved in something shadier. Dean tried to remember if the guy had any active warrants, but he didn't come up with anything.

Leaning forward, he whispered to Cas, "For the love of all that's holy, tell me I didn't just get cockblocked by Balthazar Novak."

Cas winced his eyes closed.

"For the love of all that's holy," Balthazar Novak mocked, "stop molesting my baby brother, Officer Winchester."

"My hands were above the waist!" Dean protested, but he did back away and turn to look into the living room.

"And below the clothing." Balthazar speared Cas with a pointedly judgemental glare. "Really? This is what you choose to bring home? It's like you haven't been paying attention to anything I've taught you. Fuck The Man, absolutely, but don't _fuck_ The Man!"

"Yes, you're right. I should be getting him to arrest me instead." Cas's crossed arms were tight and unyielding against his chest. "I assume that's how you know each other?"

Balthazar made a series of offended noises while Dean scratched the short hairs at the back of his neck and offered Cas a shrug. Then he asked, "But your brother, really? I mean, I knew the last name, but it's not that uncommon. And he's," he paused, trying to come up with the least insulting phrasing and settling on a sweeping gesture and, "Well, you know, him."

"Balthazar spent many of our formative years across the Atlantic," Cas explained. Dean didn't miss the emphasis on _our_ , and from the way the older sibling looked guiltily to the side, he wasn't alone. "He tries to make up for it by interfering in my life in the most stereotypically obnoxious 'big brother' ways that he can."

"On that note, I'm taking you out!" Balthazar announced cheerfully. "You're not working and you clearly need better wingmen."

Cas growled at that, moving closer to, even protectively in front of, Dean. "I don't need any wingmen. I already have plans for tonight, which I will explain to you in _graphic_ detail if you don't—"

A demanding knock interrupted the threat, earning a baleful stare that Dean was surprised didn't set the door on fire, and someone pushed into the house before any of them could respond. He recognized the newcomer from the previous day's overdose: Gabriel, the other paramedic from Cas's station, who hollered in greeting, "Let's get drinking!" Then he stopped, face twisting in confusion as he registered Dean's presence. "Do I know him? I think I know him."

"Picking them up on the job, Cassie?" Balthazar groaned. "That's just unprofessional!"

The recent arrival snapped in epiphany and pointed at Dean with a grin. "The cop! Is that why you made me wait outside the PD for half an hour the other day, you filthy little slut?" He leered at Cas, waggling his eyebrows several times more than Dean felt was strictly necessary.

Castiel's scowl hardened, piercing blue eyes giving equal attention to his brother and his partner. "Balthazar. Gabriel. This is Dean. We met, not at work, a few nights ago. I am taking him to my room now, where we will be engaging in sexual intercourse. You're welcome to stay and listen—"

"And you'll get an earful, let me tell you, he's loud," Dean contributed, still feeling a little lost but wanting to be helpful.

"—but it may be several hours, and I will not be inclined to go out with you afterwards. Feel free to show yourselves out." He grabbed Dean's arm and Dean let himself be pulled down the hallway. Because he was a cocky little shit, he looked back and favored Balthazar with his cheekiest grin and a finger-twiddling wave.

Once they were shut inside the room, though, Cas let go and dropped to the edge of the bed, rubbing his face in his hands. "I apologize. That was inappropriate."

"Are you kidding?" Dean snorted. "That was freakin' awesome. I mean, I'll never be able to arrest your brother with a straight face again, but hey, some sacrifices are worth it."

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say, because Cas just groaned and hunched further into himself. "So you _have_ arrested him."

"Uh, yeah. Like four times. Sorry." He cast about for a better conversation topic, came up empty, and tried, "He's looking better, though. He, uh..." Still hopped up on coke? Would Cas even know about that?

"Sober? As far as I know. Since his last arrest, last year, I think. Was that...?"

"Me, yeah." Cas was still on the bed, elbows on his thighs and fingers pressing into his brow, so Dean wandered around the room, nosy and trying to relieve the awkwardness. He stopped near the headboard, studying a large picture. Even with a chubby five-year-old's face, he recognized the dark hair and serious blue eyes. "You were a cute kid," he offered. "Is that Balthazar?"

Cas looked back to where he was pointing and nodded. "That's all of my siblings. The girl is Anna, and you know me and Balthazar. On the far end is Michael, the oldest. And..." Dean, who'd been tracing his finger over the faces, paused at the remaining boy. Maybe twelve or thirteen, his dark blond hair looked soft as the bangs fell into eyes slightly greyer than Castiel's, but just as intense. "And Lucien."

There was a quietness as Cas voiced the name, reverence and longing and old grief rolled together, that Dean recognized. Maybe it wasn't his place, but professional curiosity won out. "What happened?"

Cas considered him in silence, forehead furrowed and lips pursed. Dean wasn't sure what he was searching for, but he kept his face relaxed, mildly interested and sympathetic, not letting it shift into one of his work modes. Cas wasn't a suspect or a victim—at least, not his victim—and if he didn't get an answer, that was fine.

Just when he was sure he wouldn't get a response, and started moving away to poke around some more, Cas said, "He disappeared a few weeks after that picture. Undoubtedly abducted, though we never found out for sure. He was walking me home from school, just the two of us that day. I got distracted by..." He chuckled dryly, not really amused. "By a bumblebee. The next thing I know, I'm alone on the street." He shrugged and fell silent again.

"Shit." Dean sat beside him on the bed. He clenched his hands a few times, not sure what to do with them, and said, "Look, I've got brother. Sam. Sammy. I half raised that kid, and it woulda killed me if anything happened to him, but... You know it's not your fault, right? You were, what, five? Six?"

Cas laughed again, but it was still off. "Yes, Dean, I was five and that was a long time ago. I appreciate the sentiment, but I've processed it all by now."

"Right. Sorry. Shit."

Cas took one of Dean's hands, still fidgeting in his lap, and held it in both of his own. "No, Dean, _I'm_ sorry. You didn't come here for this, or to be harassed by Balthazar. I understand if you want to go."

Cas tried to release him, but Dean twined their fingers together loosely—gentle reassurance, not real intimacy. He was a little uncomfortable with how serious the conversation got, but he had asked. They'd come here for a reason, and Dean really wanted to follow through on it if he could get the mood back.

Besides, he hadn't heard the older Novak leave yet, and the only thing more embarrassing than Balthazar witnessing his walk of shame would be Balthazar witnessing his walk of not getting any.

So he looked from their joined hands to Cas's nervously neutral face and quirked his mouth into his best flirtatious grin. It rarely failed. The secret, he though (not that he ever practiced in front of a mirror), was in the way it rounded his cheeks and filled his eyes with boyish mischief. "What if I want to stay?"

A returning shy smile—no, he realized, not shy: coy—marked another successful deployment of his charms. Cas fell back on the bed, dragging Dean onto hands and knees above him. "Loud, am I?" he challenged, and though they both knew it was a lie, never let it be said that Dean backed down from a dare.

The outer door slammed before they got very far, and they paused a moment to share breathless laughter.


	2. Drunk on the Moon

Balthazar didn't witness Dean's walk of shame, after all. But it turned out Castiel's place was closer to the station, and it was late and he had to get up early, and he'd have had to change into his uniform at work anyway, and stronger men than he had fallen victim to sleepy promises of morning blowjobs, so:

"Dean Winchester, those are the same clothes you left in yesterday," Jo accused before he could duck away into the men's locker room.

He feigned innocence, glancing down over his jeans and threadbare black t-shirt with a shrug. "Just grabbed them off the floor," he tried, but she just snorted.

"I'm sure you did, but it wasn't your floor." Dean refused to dignify that slanderous accusation with a response, but she kept prodding. "Don't even try to tell me it had nothing to do with tall, dark, and life-savey."

"Yeah, okay. Cas and I hooked up again, it was great. Except his brother crashed the party. Not, like, _the_ party, no one was naked, but there was some decent gropage going on."

"Awkward." She winced in sympathy.

"You don't know the half of it." Dean glanced around, and even though there was no one in sight, he pulled Jo over to an alcove at the end of the hall. "Get this—who do you think of when you hear the name Novak?"

Jo considered, but only briefly. "That smug little shit with the pretentious art thing over on the boulevard. He's got a weird-ass first name, Baldwin or Bradford or whatever."

"Balthazar," Dean suggested.

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"No."

"Fucking yes. I stuck my dick in Balthazar Novak's little brother. Twice, actually, if you count—"

"Ugh." Jo wrinkled her nose in disgust and shoved him away. "Way TMI, douchebag. Jesus. At least it's a degree of separation, you're not fucking the man himself." They both grimaced at that image.

The first couple of day shift officers were already heading into the briefing room fully decked out, so with a few more escalating twisted faces, Dean and Jo hurried off to get dressed.

After the morning check-in, the two of them swung by Special Projects. Officially, Ash's shift was 1000-2000, so he shouldn't be in for a few more hours yet; unofficially, he jerked awake when Dean kicked the side of his desk.

"Uncalled for, dude!" Ash protested, the hand he ran through his hair entirely failing to tame his bedhead into something respectable.

"Detective Badass! You get our present?"

"Sure did, kiddos. Roy McLeach and Walter Sykes had this, really?"

"Took it off Roy myself," Dean confirmed. "Why? Not that unusual for them to have shit they shouldn't."

"If this were actually morphine from RRE's new drug division—which we did know about, bulletin just hasn't gone out yet—that they'd ripped off somehow, that would be annoying but not weird. This, though? This ain't morphine."

Dean and Jo frowned at each other before looking back to the detective as Dean asked, "The lab results came back already?"

That got a well-deserved snort. "Maybe by the time my balls reach my knees. They're backed up on actual priorities. But not to worry, we've got the technology!" Ash rooted around on his desk and pulled out a sad-looking beige case, plastic dented on almost all sides, and opened it to proudly display some equally banged-up cardboard boxes.

"Field drug testing kit?" Jo guessed.

"Ayup. This beauty can't do everything the State Patrol lab can, but it can tell you if you're looking at morphine or heroin."

"And?" Dean asked, despite actually being pretty good at his job and having a decent idea where this was going.

"Those beautifully labelled, carefully manufactured vials claiming to be Dick Roman's legal-if-controlled happy juice were straight-up smack. The big question is whether that happened before or after they left the factory. Well, that and how fucking big his balls must be if he's opened a VUCSA factory in my backyard."

"It is Roman," Dean said. "I generally prefer not to contemplate his balls, but considering how much he's gotten away with so far, why not try to turn violating the uniform controlled substances act into a legitimate business endeavor?"

Ash stretched, fluffing his mullet and settling his head onto the narcotic identification kit as a pillow. "I've got a very important meeting now, friendos, but this is the next big thing. We're gonna bring that sucker down on this. Any more RRE pharmaceuticals you come across, you bring 'em straight to me. I don't care if they're from the spoiled junkie rich kids who pass out in our fine parks or a poor little old lady's stolen purse—you got a reason to seize it for evidence, I want it."

He was snoring before they could respond; probably faking, but they had no particular reason to object. They wandered through the station, passing the information off quietly to those who needed it, then getting in their separate cars and meeting up with other officers in convenience store parking lots and coffee shops to finish the dissemination.

Other than that, it turned out to be another long, boring day. After his shift, after a lot of deliberation on whether it was too close to clingy to call so soon (some of which might have been out loud to Jo; she had barely tolerated it, then told him to shut up, then ten minutes later actually stolen his phone to dial the number), Dean checked in with Castiel to see if the medic wanted to join him for end-of-the-work-week drinks at the Roadhouse.

"I know it's a little early," he hedged, glancing at the 16:07 on his watch, "But you know how it is with shift work. Plus, Ellen lets me mess with the music and pour my own shots when the place is empty."

"That sounds more enjoyable than going when it's crowded," Cas said.

"I dunno, you didn't seem to mind the crowd at Panthers."

"A certain critical mass is required for that sort of outing. When it's just going out with friends, I tend to prefer things a bit calmer."

"What makes you think this isn't that sort of outing?" Dean asked with a cheeky grin that he sincerely hoped could be heard across the line. "I don't know about you, but I've got a dick that ain't had company in nearly twelve hours."

Cas chuckled, but didn't answer directly, instead mentioning he had planned to meet up with a friend in a few hours, and would Dean mind if he invited her along. Dean was disappointed, no question, but about to agree when Castiel added, "Just to the bar, of course. I think your poor, lonely dick should be introduced to my poor, lonely dick in private, so that will have to wait until afterwards."

Dean could get on board with that.

Castiel's friend Meg turned out to be the snarkiest bitch Dean had ever met, and he had known some snarky bitches. She was a psych nurse at Greenwood Hospital and appeared to be entirely unimpressed by anything about Dean, with the exception of, "Well, I guess he's kinda pretty."

He sneered, she sneered back, and they more or less got along once they started doing tequila shots. She even shot him a lusty wink when he and Cas, who watched their drinking contest with bemusement and no participation, left to go acquaint their dicks.

It became a tradition. He met Castiel at the Roadhouse after work on Thursdays, unless Cas was working. Most of the time, they had a couple drinks and went back to Cas's place for some frankly fantastic sex. Sometimes Jo, Gabe, Meg, or Balthazar joined them; if it was one or more of the first three, half the time they all ended up too wasted to do much, and Dean and Jo crashed upstairs while Gabe, Meg, and Cas sorted themselves out. If it was big brother, he and Dean sniped at each other every time Cas left them alone and Dean was as handsy as Cas let him get away with.

Once, and he really ought to have felt guiltier about it than he did, the perfect combination of barely any sleep after a ridiculously busy shift and Ellen's best vodka helped convince Cas to accept a fast and sloppy blowjob in the staff bathroom while Balthazar waited for them to come back with another round of drinks. He took one look at the pair when they returned together and stormed out, leaving them with his tab. Cas was too worn out to be confused, which made it all so much better.

Another time, his friend and fellow officer Benny surprised him by actually taking him up on the invitation. Between his schedule on night shift and him being a newly single father ever since his selfish bitch of a wife had taken off to "find herself," he hadn't been up for much socializing on his days off. But he'd found Krissy a babysitter for the night and showed up when Dean, Jo, and Cas were a few drinks in. Meg had opted for a tumbler of something dark green and sipped at it conservatively. Cas stopped in the middle of a sentence and glared at Benny when he approached the table; Benny glared back.

"Uh, problem?"

Dean had no idea what the issue could be. If they'd ever met, it was probably on the job—unless Benny had some sort of bisexual awakening going on now that Andrea was gone? He doubted it, but neither of them would tell him anything. They just shrugged it off, sat at opposite ends of the table, and ignored each other. Benny didn't meet up with them again after that, though he made more time to see Dean and Jo on their own.

Sometimes Ellen gave Dean significant looks when it was just him and Cas and they sat in a booth for hours barely touching their drinks, talking and laughing. Those nights, when he noticed, Dean rolled his eyes, made up some bullshit or another, and left alone. The subsequent masturbation wasn't nearly as satisfying, but he thought it made his point. If he wasn't sure what that point was, well, he sure as hell didn't have to admit it.

Life arranged itself into a new and mostly comfortable pattern. Dean met up with Castiel a few times a week, if they were both free. Sometimes they hung out for dinner, occasionally Dean slept at Cas's house, and a lot of the time they fucked the hell out of each other and went their separate ways. Jo gave him constant shit about how much more agreeable he was now that he was getting laid regularly and well—he couldn't deny the quality, but he really could do without Jo, of all people, commenting. He was glad, though, that the two of them were okay enough for her to joke about it. If she'd been too awkward, too hurt by his frequent encounters with a single person who wasn't her, he would've had to call the whole thing off. He'd have done anything for Jo, she was family, but he would've been a little bitter about missing out on a reliably good fuck.

Work was as quiet as it ever got. There were thefts and wife-beaters and husband-beaters and car crashes and a slowly but noticeably increasing number of overdoses. The police analysts were still figuring out the stats, but Dean was pretty sure, just from his own experience and talking to other squads, that they were increasingly fatal, too. To everyone's frustration, no more vials from RRE showed up at their scenes.

"There's no way these jokers are together enough to hide their shit this well while actively trying to die," Ash griped one afternoon as he, Dean, and Jo hung back to watch the K9 officer lead his dog around the tarps and sleeping bags hidden away in a forested park just off Stone Creek Boulevard. Through the trees, they could see all the overblown art galleries and hipster restaurants and that wine bar that got broken into three times in its first month of existence; they were the ones who had called in to complain about this unauthorized tent city.

GPD's drug and tracking dog was a beautiful all-white German shepherd, and when he wasn't sticking his nose in a transient's crotch, he had a lot more dignity than anything named 'Mr Fizzles' had a right to. ("We can call him Fizz!" Garth had insisted. "It's badass!")

Fizz found nothing in the encampment, which was just stupidly suspicious. A body bag full of cocaine and dismembered limbs would have been less suspicious. Ash swore up a storm in the passenger seat of Dean's patrol car as they drove back to the station.

"Someone is organizing my junkies," he complained. "First Dick the dick starts manufacturing smack—and did I telling you? I called in a favor at the lab, they ran some tests. Nothing in those vials but heroin and water. Pure, sterile, shit's so good it's unreal.

"So medical grade illegal drugs, then our habitual users, who clearly haven't just rethought their life choices given how fast they're dropping, aren't carrying anything, ever. There's some big shit going down, amigo."

"Here's what I don't get," Dean pondered. "So Roman's trying to own the drug scene. He's doing remarkably well at it, except for one thing. He's so careful not to let us get any more evidence, I'm guessing they have to be supervised when they get the shit. So he's built a multimillion dollar drug lab, hired... fucking nursemaids to babysit the shots—why is he not controlling doses better?

"He's in a prime position to have his goon or goons regulate how much people get, maybe prevent ODs altogether. Why isn't he? Dead customers are bad for business _and_ they get our attention."

"Million dollar question," Ash agreed.

Dean promised to spend the next few days poking around as much as possible, seeing if he could get anyone to talk to him.

He was all set to follow up on that the next day, but before briefing ended they got a call on the screen for a missing juvenile, and Dean recognized the address. A few minutes later, he was standing in Linda Tran's living room because she hadn't seen or heard from Kevin in almost twenty-four hours.

"He went to work yesterday morning," she said. "He started two weeks ago at a gallery downtown. It's not everything he was looking for, but the owner promised he could help with the business side and networking, so that should be good. That man, though, he's very strange. I'm worried he'll be a bad influence. The gallery is on Stone Creek Boulevard, it's called—"

"I know exactly which one you're talking about," Dean sighed. As he left the house, he reached for his radio. "Sixty-five, can you meet me at 7829 Stone Creek in ten?"

It didn't seem like a great idea to make this next stop alone.

A larger-than-life oil painting greeted Dean and Jo as they opened the ridiculous wrought iron door of Ménage. It was labeled _Abstract 3_ , but pretty clearly depicted a well—and recently—used vagina. From Jo's choked-off snort, she saw it too.

"Sorry, boys, donut shop's next door," Balthazar called out as they rounded the entry into the otherwise empty gallery. "I know, easy mistake to make when you can't read the mean old letters."

"Screw yourself, douchebag," Dean grinned, and honestly, he was almost enjoying himself just for the chance to harass his nemesis. The edge of worry about the kid killed any fun he could have, though. "Kevin Tran working today?"

"My employees don't talk to apes in pig suits, and their schedules are none of your business."

"See, that's where you're wrong. Kevin talks to me all the time. We're buddies." Dean felt the smugness widening his smirk as he wandered around the gallery, eyeing the questionable works of art. He also felt a bit like a film noir cliche of a crooked extortionist cop— _be a shame if something happened to the place_ —but didn't particularly mind. "I like the kid. So when his mom calls up and says he never came back from working for you last night, I get worried."

"Is he here?" Jo asked.

"No." Balthazar actually sounded concerned, and Dean turned to see him pull a sleek red cell phone from somewhere in his ridiculously tight pants. "He texted me this morning to say he wouldn't be in, a family emergency."

Dean looked at the offered screen. Balthazar was too wary to actually hand him the phone, but he could at least confirm the message came from the number Linda gave them as Kevin's and said more or less what Balthazar claimed. He could also see the man's surprisingly thoughtful response. "Take as long as you need, let me know if I can help?" he read with raised eyebrows.

Balthazar yanked the phone back. "So I like the brat," he snapped. "He may be a little dweeb of a goody-two-shoes, but he works hard and he's smart. In the first two days, he found me a cheaper source for higher quality frames and reorganized my existing inventory so that I stop reordering sizes I already have."

"And yesterday?"

"He was here until about eleven; we had a bit of a party. I told him to get out at half ten, but he insisted on cleaning up some first. The only thing I've heard since was that text, then you showing up to ruin my day."

"Sorry to inconvenience you with a missing seventeen-year-old. We'll be going now, but call us if you hear anything." Jo had to just about push Dean out the door, but he didn't start arguing until they were back at their cars.

"Seriously, we're leaving it at that?" It was definitely an authoritative demand, not an aggrieved whine. "Come on, Jo, you know this doesn't sit right. Kevin Tran's a good kid and Balthazar Novak is a scumbag."

"I wanna find the kid too, but we're clearly not going to get anything here. I think the jewelry store two doors down has a camera, maybe they've got something actually useful. So your little justice hard-on for your boyfriend's brother is just gonna have to wait."

"He's not my boyfriend," Dean grumbled even though he knew it sounded petulant, "And I don't have any sort of hard-on for his brother."

Spangler's Bangles turned out to be a bust; they did have a camera facing the alley behind the stores, but, "It hasn't actually worked for a year," the owner said. "We're mostly hoping its existence discourages people." The one facing their entrance was functional, but it only recorded four hours before overwriting the footage.

After another hour of driving around, contacting Kevin's friends, and generally not coming up with anything, Dean admitted defeat and took his report back to the station so Kevin could be entered into the national database of missing persons. It sucked and left him in a shitty mood for the rest of the day, sarcastic and bitchy to everyone he talked to, until it reached the point where Sgt. Henricksen got a call from a man he may have been a little rude to on a traffic stop and summoned Dean to the sergeants' office.

"You can't tell a citizen you want to euthanize his car for its own good, Dean. What the hell were you thinking?"

"That if he's gonna drive a BMW over sidewalks like he's off-roading, he can do it out in county."

Victor was more or less constantly done with Dean's shit, though they were friendly off-duty, and the glare he got now was no exception. "You're lucky I talked him down from a formal complaint. Go work your shit out in PT. If I hear you so much as sass dispatch again, I'm assigning you every paper call and custody transport we get for the rest of the month."

Dean obediently changed and worked out for an hour, alternating weights and cardio and pushing himself harder than was probably responsible with several hours left on his shift. But he did feel better for having exercised, and that was all it took to remind himself that he needed to "Get his crap in order and stop acting like a preteen who didn't get asked to the dance." (The text from Pamela saying those exact words might have also helped.)

He reigned in his surliness for the rest of the shift, even stopping by the comms center to charm them with an apology. ("Not a chance," Pam told him. "Bring me coffee and we'll talk.") It took almost thirty bucks in drinks and snacks at Starbucks, but he got himself back in radio's good graces.

Otherwise, the day was a bust. He couldn't find Kevin, he couldn't find any info for Ash, and the lingering bad temper stuck with him through the drive home and two bottles of beer. On his way to a third, his phone rang.

"Winchester," he answered without checking the display.

"Dean."

"Cas? Oh, shit, we were gonna do that dinner thing."

"The eating of it, yes. There's still time, if you want to come over."

"Sorry, I had a crap day. Partially thanks to your wonderful brother, but that's not your problem. Anyway, I've had a few and I probably shouldn't be driving."

"I could bring it there?"

Dean knew why Cas sounded hesitant. In the couple of months they'd been hanging out, all their meetings were at Cas's place or some third-party location. He wasn't sure why he balked at the idea of bringing Cas back to his apartment—he'd stopped doing it with random pickups after Ava, but by that point he could be reasonably certain that Cas wouldn't try to burn the building down when Dean called things off.

Because Dean was going to call things off. Not necessarily soon, and hopefully not on bad terms, but he had already pushed the limits of what he was willing to do for a good fuck. Cas was fantastic in bed, low-stress, and drama-free, but an itching paranoia at the base of Dean's scalp told him that it was too good to be true. The entire thing was too easy and he had let it go too long. Someone was gonna get needy—not him—or bored—maybe him—and then they'd both be back where they started a couple months before, none the worse for wear and maybe even with a new infrequent booty-call out of the deal.

It was working for the time being, he reminded himself. That was fine, but something still twinged at the thought of Castiel in the place that felt more like home than anything else had in twenty-five years.

So he said, "Nah, I'm just gonna call it a night."

"All right. Goodnight, Dean."

Just like that. Easy as pie, no expectations to lead to hurt feelings, and that was what Dean appreciated most about the man.

"Oh, Dean? Just one more thing. If you come over tomorrow night, plan on staying. You won't be in any condition to drive, even if I do untie you."

Okay, second most.

Feeling a bit lighter, Dean bypassed the fridge and headed for his bedroom instead. "You got plans, huh?"

"I do. I think you'll like them."

Dean thought he probably would, too. He was convinced enough, in fact, that he popped the button on his jeans before he'd even made it to the room and asked, "You wanna tell me about 'em? You know, make sure we're on the same page here."

Cas hesitated, making a slight, muffled noise that Dean couldn't interpret over the phone, and he felt his unhappy unease threatening to return. He didn't like that he was worrying again about pushing the boundaries of their non-relationship. But the sound resolved into a chuckle.

"Just to clarify before I embarrass myself... Phone sex? Is that what you're suggesting?"

Blowing out a sigh, Dean took his hand out of his pants and flopped back on his bed. "It was just an idea," he grumbled.

"No, that's not—I'm sorry, Dean. I wasn't mocking you, I just worried I was misinterpreting. I didn't want to push you into something you weren't looking for after you've already said you'd had a hard day. I'd be more than happy to go into detail, if you'd like."

It turned out to be a very good night, after all.

Life improved even further the next morning, when Dean sat down at briefing and learned that Kevin Tran had returned home the night before. He was up and out of his seat before they'd even been dismissed, earning a wry look from Victor.

"Kid's been home for hours, you know," his sergeant said. "Night shift already checked on him and cleared him from the system."

Dean didn't pout. He was a grown man and an officer of the law, and he absolutely, positively did not slip his lower lip out and widen his eyes at Henricksen until the man relented.

"Oh fine, you child. Just get out of here, you're making me sick," Victor grumbled, shooing him out. "Don't forget you owe me three reports!" he called after Dean's retreating back. Dean tossed a wave over his shoulder.

When he got to the Tran's house, Linda was surprised but pleased. As she led him into the living room, she said, "Thank you for coming out personally. The other officers just don't have the same relationship with Kevin as you do, maybe he'll talk to you."

That hadn't made it into the reports. Dean stopped and rested a hand softly on her upper arm, turning her attention back to him. "He's not talking?"

"He's lying." Even though Linda's voice was tight and disapproving, the look she shot over at the kitchen, where Kevin sat with his back to them, betrayed her maternal concern. "I know I can be strict, but he's never been afraid to tell me the truth when he's broken rules before. I think my son is in trouble, Officer Winchester, but he won't tell me what's going on."

"Do you think I can talk to him alone? I know you're worried, but he might be more willing to open up if it's just the two of us. If he thinks you'll be mad, or if it's something to do with a girl—or a boy—it could be easier for him to tell me."

Linda hesitated, gaze lingering on Kevin, but she set her jaw and nodded. "But you tell my son, whatever it is, I'm his mother and I will stand by him."

Kevin didn't look nearly as thrilled as his mom to see Dean. In fact, he didn't look good at all. Purple and red bruising swelled over his right eye, keeping it mostly shut, and a scabbing cut broke through the skin of his cheekbone. His good eye darted up to look at Dean, then quickly away. Down, like he was ashamed.

"You look like crap."

Dean's frankness surprised another second of eye contact out of the teen before he shrugged. "It's not a big deal. I stayed over at a friend's and hit my head. You're wasting taxpayer money on nothing."

"You need to stop working for Balthazar Novak," Dean told him.

He didn't expect Kevin's panicked flail at the offhanded remark. "What? Why?" Kevin tried to compose himself, but it was a very poor attempt.

Making no secret of his skepticism, he explained in an overly careful tone, "Because you're starting to sound like him. Why did you think I meant?" At Kevin's silence, he added, "Because this has to do with him, right?"

"No! No, it's not—there's nothing to even have anything to do with him."

"You know that I know that you're bullshitting me, right?" Dean flicked his finger back and forth between Kevin's face and his own chest with each respective pronoun. The one on 'me' felt awkward after he did it, so he dropped his hand to knock against the table instead. It wasn't much better. He made a face and put it away; fortunately, Kevin had been too busy dropping his ashamed gaze to the floor to notice.

"I don't want to get anyone in trouble," Kevin said. "It was just a... a misunderstanding. It's not a big deal."

Try as Dean might, he couldn't get Kevin to give him any more than that. He also couldn't shake the feeling that Ménage and Balthazar were to blame, particularly since Kevin insisted with exceptional nervousness that they weren't. Since he couldn't get Kevin to own up to it, he figured he might as well head over to the gallery and try to press Balthazar instead. School would be starting again soon, so at least Kevin would hopefully be out of whatever trouble was being stirred up there. Balthazar was at its center, Dean was sure. And Balthazar might be a better liar than Kevin, and a dirtball besides, but Dean didn't have to be nice to him, so at the very least it would prove to be a more satisfying line of questioning.

Except that Ménage was closed when he got there, the door locked and the windows dark. Maybe the fact that Kevin had been at home instead of work should have clued him in, but he didn't know the kid's schedule and it was within the gallery's normal operating time, according to the hours etched artfully into one window. There wasn't even a sign posted to explain the closure.

Sitting in his car, Dean pulled up Balthazar's info on his laptop and briefly considered harassing him at home—his driver's license showed an address on the other side of the city. But as much as it irked him, there wasn't much he could do with a victim who refused to cooperate. He didn't want to get on Victor's bad side a second day in a row by wasting his time with unnecessary follow-up outside of his assigned district. So he forced himself to shrug it off and carried on with the rest of his day.

Other than that frustration, it proved to be a pretty good day. The rest of his shift was about average, not too crazy but busy enough that it wasn't boring, and after work he swung by his apartment before heading to Cas's. He might as well have a clean change of clothes for the morning.


	3. Semi Suite

The next day was Thursday, and Dean was already at the Roadhouse sipping a smoky whiskey when he saw Cas's text. Apparently Balthazar had broken his arm Wednesday morning—probably why the gallery was closed, Dean realized—and had guilted Cas into coming over to cook for him. That also meant that Dean had to give upon the assumed promise of mature recreational activities after, so he made himself comfortable at the bar and considered whether to head home or hang out awhile longer.

He hadn't picked anyone up in a few months, not since that night at Panthers with Cas. He hadn't had to: he was getting laid well and often, and calling or texting Cas was a hell of a lot less effort than going out and trying to find someone new to fuck. He didn't know if Cas was getting some elsewhere and didn't care either way. They used condoms without question—had even used one that first drunken night when Dean blew Cas in a sketchy motel—so it wasn't like he had to be worried about catching anything.

If anything, he'd be impressed if Cas had the time and energy to fuck around more than the two of them were already doing. And surprised, because there was no way Balthazar wouldn't try to rub it in his face—like he'd actually get jealous. They were monogamous by chance, because it was easier. Not because they had any commitments.

And since Dean was already there...

He swiveled on his stool and scanned the room. He felt like fucking, specifically. He wanted to bury himself in a warm, willing body and take it nice and slow. A man would probably be less work on the pick-up front, though the Roadhouse on a Thursday night wasn't exactly bustling with guys who'd be open to Dean's advances, and it took more time and patience to get to the penetrative side of things. It wasn't something he tended to do the first time around with random dudes. Finding a woman who was into spending some quality time with him probably wouldn't be much harder, given the crowd in the bar, and wouldn't require the same sort of prep once they actually got to it.

Plus, he could wring climax after climax out of her as he fucked her, make her pussy clench and spasm around his cock until he was done and she was a breathless mess. Yeah, that sounded pretty good.

He looked over the prospects. A few women with husbands or boyfriends, which wasn't an entirely unappealing idea, if they were looking for a third, but was again likely to require a lot more work than he was willing to put into getting laid tonight. No, single was the way to go. Single and hopefully not crazy, which was why he avoided the questionably legal girl with facial tattoos eyeing him from the corner. But at the far end of the room, a table held what looked like a group of friends on a girls' night out, relaxed and having a good time but not drunk off their asses.

As he considered his approach, including a determining a tenuous ranking and how many of the five women he could hit on before looking and feeling too pathetic to be worth it, someone plopped into the seat beside him and said, "Deano. Did Cas leave you all alone to play nursemaid? Poor thing."

He turned to nod a half-hearted greeting at Meg. She was definitely not an option for the night's activities; again, he'd learned his lesson about sticking his dick in crazy. She was a reasonably cool person, but Dean had no doubts about the murderous potential behind her bright eyes and dangerous smile. She could be a good wingman, though. Or she could ruin his chances entirely, and he didn't know her well enough to pick up on what sort of mood she was in yet.

"Come sit and chat with me a minute," she said, which sounded a lot more like cockblocking than helping him score, but maybe it would be over quickly. And honestly, he didn't want to get on her bad side, due to the aforementioned crazy.

Cradling his tumbler to protect it from any clumsy drunks they passed, he followed Meg to a boot and slid in across the table from her. Before they could get to chatting, though, someone stepped into Dean's peripheral vision, right at the edge of their booth. Dean looked over to find a man on the short and stocky side with a receding hairline, wearing a black suit with a black shirt and a black tie—really going for a theme, there—and an oily smile.

"Maggie," the man said with a fondness that even Dean, who had never met him before, could tell was fake. He also, unfortunately, knew Meg well enough to know that she did not like to be called Margaret, Marge, Maggie, or any of the other numerous nicknames her given name could spawn. Dean, when he felt particularly feisty and uninhibited, could spawn quite a lot.

Meg's lip curled in a snarling smile as she replied, "Fergus."

The man grimaced, which Dean couldn't blame him for. Fergus was a terrible name. It was no wonder he turned away from her and flashed his insincere smile at Dean, instead.

"Do forgive my interruption, Margaret and I are old friends who lost touch. I just moved to Greenwood and I had no idea I risked the pleasure of running into her here. I'm Crowley."

Dean generally tried not to be an asshole all the time. It came naturally to him, so he fought it to the best of his ability (and patience) when appropriate. But he didn't feel even a bit bad looking past the newcomer's outstretched hand and raising an eyebrow at Meg.

She looked like a cat with a mouthful of canary. "Oh, Dean, you'll love him. Fergus—"

"Crowley."

" _Fergus_ sells drugs to children."

Crowley sneered at her, but he didn't actually deny the accusation, Dean noted. "And Dean, is it? What exactly do you do?"

"Castiel," Meg taunted smoothly before Dean could answer, which at least partly solved the mystery for him of who Crowley was. Someone who used to do Cas.

Dean didn't know Crowley, obviously. He didn't know anything about the particulars of Crowley and Cas's relationship, or how long ago it had ended—though it sounded like it had been a while. Depending on those variables, he could have expected Meg's revelation to evoke a variety of responses from the man: jealousy, apathy, wistfulness, regret. He didn't expect Crowley's face to light up with a mean grin.

"So this _is_ where my darling Cas ran off to. Delightful. And what's the little crackwhore up to these days, hm?"

He looked Dean over again, his gaze assessing, but Dean didn't let him finish whatever thought was forming. "How about you fuck off now?"

It wasn't really a question.

Crowley didn't fuck off, but he did write Dean off and return his attention to Meg. "You tell dear, sweet Castiel that when this one goes sideways, as it's bound to do, I'll be more than happy to... coddle him through another loss."

Dean wasn't big on dick-swinging. He was a cocky bastard, sure, but he drew the line at whipping it out and measuring to prove that _mine's bigger than yours_. Something about this Crowley guy pissed him off, though, got under his skin and stuck there until he itched to do something about it. So even though he knew it made him a douchebag, he pulled out his badge, slapped it on the table, and looked up at the slimy asshole. "That so?"

The sleaze was taken aback, but only for a moment. Regaining his composure, he said, "You ought to be careful, Officer. I imagine the department frowns on its officers getting done for solicitation."

That implication was too laughable to even be worth thinking about, so Dean skipped right on past it. "I think I'll be fine. They love a good drug raid, though. Where did you say you live?"

"My home is immaculate," Crowley snapped. "Do you really think Cas can say the same?"

"Yep." That was easy, would've been even if Dean hadn't spent so many evenings in Cas's house—in Cas's bedroom.

Because at some point, Cas must have gone through a background investigation and psych evaluation almost as intense as Dean's handful of them had been. Sure, Dean had lied his way through, and he still felt guilty as hell. But only the first one had been for the wrong reasons, on his dad's orders. It had been a bitch to set up, too, even with John's connections setting up a fake past for him. After that, it had all been about maintaining the life he'd carved for himself free of his father's influence. He was a good cop and he loved his job, and in the end that mattered more than a few details about his past that would have seen him disqualified at best, arrested at worst.

But the thing was, Dean had been lying about who he was since he was four. It came easy, and it had given him a grifter's knack for spotting a fellow con. He trusted his instincts, and they told him Cas couldn't pull off that level of deception. So he casually returned his badge to its pocket and smiled a slow, dangerous smile.

"Get the fuck out of my bar," he said, voice low and steady, "and get the fuck out of my city. If I see you again, I'm going to ruin you."

Crowley snapped his mouth shut, face reddening, and spun on his heel without a word.

"Well, you certainly showed him," Meg oozed when he was out of sight.

"Fuck you," Dean bit back, because he was classy. "Him and Cas, really?"

"Ages ago." She looked him over. "I'm not sure his taste has improved much since then, with one notable exception."

She preened, tossing her hair and smirking at him so that he couldn't be sure if she meant what he thought she meant. "No," he insisted, drawing out the vowel into a low breath, and she laughed.

"Don't get your panties in a twist, handsome. Unlike some people, _I_ have standards. Poor little Castiel did think he was in love with me, though."

The phrasing somehow threw him more than the meaning. "Whaddya mean he _thought_?"

"Please, the boy can barely look at a vagina without gagging. He was just grateful for my wonderful friendship after too many people treating him like shit. Which brings us back around to you."

"What? How the hell does that bring anyone around to me?"

She leaned forward on her elbows, lips slowly spreading into a smile that wasn't at all friendly. "I think it's past time we discuss your intentions toward my Clarence."

"Who?"

She rolled her eyes and enunciated, "Castiel."

"What? How do you get Clarence from—"

"Stop avoiding the question."

"I'm not avoiding it, you called him—whatever. Anyway, I _am_ refusing to answer. Because A, it's none of your business, B, I have no intentions, we're just a couple guys having a good time, and C, it's none of your goddamn business."

"This cliché male fear of commitment crap is dull, Dean. He was my boyfriend first, and I'll take him back if you're a moron about it."

"Hey, back up, we're three stations past my stop on this crazy train," Dean protested. "I get that you worry about Cas, but he ain't my boyfriend. He doesn't wanna be my boyfriend. We're doing exactly what we both wanna be doing, we even talked about it like grownups. So thanks but no thanks on the relationship advice, I'm just gonna fuck the guy as long as he wants to keep fucking me. No romance, no heartbreak, just a good time."

"And no pissing contests with jealous exes?" Meg arched a dark, perfectly shaped eyebrow, but he didn't dignify that with a response.

It did give him a lot to think about, though.

"So," Dean said over dinner three nights later, trying for a casual tone he knew he didn't achieve, "I met _Fergus_."

He'd anticipated a certain amount of discomfort on both their parts. Talking about exes was a minefield Dean tried his hardest to avoid, especially when he didn't plan for anything significant enough to qualify as an ex himself when he was done with the person he was talking to. He'd tried the boyfriend thing, it ended shittily, and he certainly didn't want to rehash it with Cas. Really, the only reason he was bringing it up at all was that he wanted to get it out of the way before the two of them ran into Meg—or, God forbid, Crowley—together.

So he wasn't expecting it to be the world's funnest conversation, but he was taken aback by how instantly stiff and blank Cas went. They sat for a moment in silence before Cas broke his stillness, reached for his glass, took a long drink, and set it back down with barely a sound. The ritual complete, he finally spoke in a quiet, dull voice.

"I didn't realize he was in the area. I haven't seen him for... many years. I assume he said something to you."

"That you're a prostitute and an addict," Dean said with a huffing laugh, grinning at the clichéd jilted-lover fallbacks.

Castiel did not smile back.

Something heavy plummeted down Dean's breastbone; he couldn't deal with this, not again. He wasn't as close to it this time—Cas was not Sammy—and he'd trained for this shit since then, so how the hell had he missed it?

"Are you fucking serious?" he demanded. Cas, still staring at his water glass, didn't respond, and the heat of Dean's anger grew. "You don't think that's something I should have known before the second or tenth time you invited me to bed?"

Castiel met his eyes, but there was only fierce, guarded pride in the stare. "No."

Dean had worked too hard, come too far to lose it all over another bad choice in meaningless fucks. Because as much as he and the man glaring fiercely at him might have agreed that's all this was, it had been months, plural. They hung out a lot, Dean stayed over some nights, he'd even met and antagonized big brother—and bad enough he kept doing it all after he found out who that was. To anyone looking into it, this would look like a relationship. Greenwood PD Officer Dean Winchester in a relationship with the junkie hooker brother of one of Greenwood's busiest petty criminals.

"Jesus, Cas, this is my fucking life we're talking about! I could lose my job over this!"

Castiel's scowl was steel-edged. "I highly doubt your chief cares about the coercive relationship the man you occasionally fuck got caught up in over a decade ago. Mine barely did."

It took Dean long enough to process that statement that his mouth was already opening to yell again before it got through. He sat down instead, clenching his jaw and rubbing a sore spot into his forehead. He'd _known_ that. When Crowley had been mouthing off at him, he'd disbelieved it because he'd known that Cas had to have gone through a background and cleared it to get the job.

"Shit," he muttered, not daring to meet Cas's eyes. "So. I may be the biggest asshole."

"You may," Cas agreed, but his voice softened slightly. "But I'm aware that Crowley can be very convincing."

Dean snorted without much humor. "You know, I didn't even believe him when he said it. I mean, I've been around enough, I'd know if you were on something. But you didn't deny it, and there's always Balthazar, and I... Yeah, okay, I overreacted the shit out of that. Sorry."

"It's a difficult subject, which is why I had hoped to avoid it. I suppose, since we've got that out of the way, I might as well clarify that while I was inarguably an addict, prostitute isn't quite accurate. I didn't 'turn tricks' or exchange sexual acts for money or drugs."

"Then how is it accurate at all?" Dean couldn't help asking. "No, wait, you don't have to answer that. You don't owe me any of this, and I really am sorry for being such a total jackass. Feel free to punch me in the face, kick me out, whatever."

Castiel's brows drew down, furrowing a wrinkle between them as he considered Dean. "Do you intend to discontinue our association in light of this new information?"

"No! God, no, though I wouldn't blame you if you did. I'm not exactly closet-skeleton free myself, if we're digging back that far. The past is the past."

"I'm glad you feel that way. I'd rather we continue as we have been, as well, but I think some explanation is warranted to avoid further misunderstandings. It all comes down to Crowley, really.

"Our relationship didn't begin transactionally. At least, not the intimate side of it. He was my dealer before he was my," Cas grimaced. "'Boyfriend' doesn't really adequately convey what we were to each other, but at the time, I suppose it's what I would have called him. He propositioned me separately from our business dealings—as far as it's possible to separate from that, I suppose. In any case, there was never any explicit trading of substances for sex. Of course, once we were involved, there were... perks.

"That's probably not what he was referring to, though." Cas got up, his face twisted into something that was probably trying for expressionless but just looked devastated instead. He was silent as he went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer, holding it out toward Dean. Dean shook his head and Cas stared at the bottle for a long time before putting it back.

When he did speak, it was directed at the metal door of the fridge, not Dean. "There were others. I don't remember a lot of them; it was always after he'd given me something strong enough that I wasn't in a position to object. Sometimes one, more often several men—at a time, in a row, it's hard to say. My understanding, though this came later, is that he accepted money for these encounters."

He turned back to Dean then, staring back at him, and while there was an indication of vulnerability in the knuckles turned white on the steel handle, his face was full of defiant challenge. He was daring Dean to say the wrong thing, which Dean suspected would be calling him a victim just as much as calling him a whore. Instead, Dean said, "What a dick," because it was reasonably safe and so clearly true. And if his voice wavered, guilt and anger and—yes—pity, Cas didn't call him on it.

Much later, after Cas had collapsed off of him and he was tired and sweaty and just a little bit sore in all the best ways, restlessness overtook Dean. Castiel shifted beside him, awake but relaxed, and the light filtering in through the curtains highlighted his hair and face with soft blue. Underneath the post-coital buzz of endorphins, Dean felt surprisingly content.

Then the thought passing through his mind since dinner returned, and he absolutely had to know: "Was it Balthazar?"

"Hm?"

"The drugs. Did he get you started?"

Cas shifted again, turning to look at Dean with an unreadable tightness around his eyes. "No. No, he hadn't come back yet. It was. I had, uh, a difficult time in high school."

"You don't have to tell me," Dean said, regretting the conversation already. Sure, he'd asked, but he didn't really need more of Cas's life story, and he certainly wasn't about to reciprocate. But Cas waved him off, so he waited.

"My sophomore year, I was found in a compromising position with another boy. The incident was not well-received. My family is devout. My father had been a pastor, my uncle and grandfather on my mother's side were 'televangelists,' I think you'd call them, Michael had just completed seminary."

"And you?" he prompted when Cas fell silent. He was already in this, so he might as well take an interest.

"I loved God, and I believed He loved me. It's not that I didn't know the teachings on homosexuality, on sodomy, or that I was unaware of my own inclinations, I just. Well, I honestly don't remember how I justified it at the time.

"In any case, things went poorly after that incident. I lost everything, Dean: my family, my friends, my faith. There was only one person at school who would talk to me, and she only started because she approved of my 'rebellion.'"

Cas wasn't smiling; it was far too harsh of an expression to even be called bittersweet, but there was a hint of fondness as he brought one hand above his face to curl out the air quotes.

"Meg?" Dean guessed.

Castiel nodded. "She was a militant nonconformist, and more than a bit of a nihilist. She would skip class to smoke pot and read Nietzsche. Eventually she convinced me to join her."

He glanced over at Dean and must have read some of the building tension and annoyance—why did he still spend time with her, why did she think she was in any position to judge Crowley—because he quickly clarified, "That's all it ever was with her, marijuana and liquor. She tried to keep me away from the hard drugs, but I was looking for something to fill the gaps where my life had been.

"Within a year, I was regulating my entire life with various substances. Painkillers and antidepressants kept me docile at home, so I could convince them I was contrite, the good son repenting for his sins. Amphetamines kept me from failing out of school. Cocaine got me through a few dates to appease my mother and oldest brother, but I wasn't particularly fond of it.

"I managed to get into a community college west of the Cascades, get some distance from my family, but it just made it easier to give in to the decadence. Then I met Crowley, and... Well."

When Castiel stayed quiet for more than a few breaths, Dean figured that was all he was going to get, and it was already more than he wanted. He didn't know what to do with the information, or with the unexpected protectiveness churning in his gut. The silence filled in the space between them, then Cas sighed.

"I've made you uncomfortable."

"No, it's. I mean—yeah, I guess. I don't know what to say to that, man. Sorry things were so shitty for you, but I'm really glad they're better now? That's pretty useless, isn't it?"

"I wasn't looking for sympathy, Dean. It just seemed a good time to tell you, and you did ask."

"I know! I know you weren't. And I did. And it probably took a lot of guts to tell me, so , you know. Thanks."

"Mm, not really. It's something my closest friends all know, so it's only appropriate for you to, as well."

If that wasn't a red flag for deflection, nothing was. "Are we BFFs now? My toenail painting is subpar, but I've had plenty of practice braiding hair."

Cas surprised him by exhaling a laugh, accepting the change in topic and strained attempt at levity. "I used to braid my sister's hair. What's your excuse?"

"High school." At Cas's confused head tilt, he elaborated with a dirty grin, "You mess up a girl's hair behind the gym, it's only polite to fix it for her."

"Popular with the ladies, were you?"

"You know it."

"And the boys?"

"No. I didn't really figure that out—or admit it, at least, until later. I guess I had the pretty typical bisexual-in-denial high school experience, as far as that goes."

"Dated a lot of girls and didn't have any problems?"

"A lot of girls, not a lot of dating. We moved around a lot, didn't really have time for deathless teenage romance."

"Why so nomadic?"

"My dad—" Spent two decades dragging him and his brother from shitty motel to shitty motel, doing terrible things to mostly not-innocent people in a manic search for vengeance against their mom's killer. _"_ —did short-term contract work. Odd jobs all over the place." Sometimes Dean helped. "Sometimes I helped. Dropped out at sixteen, actually, got my GED so I could just focus on the work." It was more than he'd meant to say, but none of it really meant much. Little facts of his life, small change.

"Sounds hard for you. Lonely."

Dean snuck a look at Cas, but the other man had his face turned towards the ceiling and his eyes closed. He looked peaceful, ready to melt into sleep at any moment, but also somehow attentive, too, waiting for Dean to keep baring his soul. In the quiet, ethereal moment, watching Cas's chest rise and fall as steady breaths passed through his barely parted lips, Dean yet again forgot how much he didn't want to bare his soul.

"Nah. Sammy hated it, but I had him and Dad and that was enough. The restlessness kinda stuck with me, to be honest. I've passed through a lot of departments before Greenwood, and I don't know how long I'll be staying here."

At that, Cas did crack open an eyelid and fix him with a sharp blue look. "I want to say you seem too comfortable with your job to be a gypsy cop, but you did say there were skeletons in your closet."

"Nah, nothing like that." It almost wasn't a lie; he'd never left an agency over pending investigations or bad behaviour, but he was running from even worse things he _had_ done. "Just didn't feel right, staying in one place too long. I do like it here, though."

Cas rolled onto his side, both eyes bright and poised to ask something else.

"Go to sleep," Dean groaned before he could. "Or at least let me sleep. Some of us got up early this morning, we don't just get to lay around for a week because the taxpayers pay us stupid amounts of money eight days a month."

Cas snorted and grabbed Dean's pillow from near his feet, where it had been discarded after being used to assist in achieving a particularly fantastic and athletic position, and flopped it into Dean's face. After a brief tussle and a less brief mutual handjob, they slept.

The night Dean realized that he hadn't been home for the entirety of Cas's six-day weekend, he very nearly hurled himself out of the bed. He managed to dress and collect all the clothes scattered on the floor—he didn't even want to think about how many were in the washer—without waking the other man.

He spent most of the drive back to his neglected apartment debating the merits of never seeing Cas again. On the one hand, the sex was awesome. It hadn't gotten boring or predictable over the months; if anything, things had improved with regularity. Dean hadn't had that much sex with a single person since—well, ever, actually. The closest had been a girlfriend, Cassie, years and years before, and they'd only had a few weeks before she kicked his ass to the curb when he told her the truth about his life.

He should've seen it coming, really, but he was young and stupid and in love. He'd thought she loved him, too; thought she'd still love him when he admitted he'd been lying about half of who he was, because the other half should have been enough. In retrospect he could understand why it hadn't been, but at the time he'd been so far under his father's influence, believed in their mission so strongly, that he'd been blindsided by her horror at his explanation of his life.

Though her rejection had hurt him bitterly, Dean had eventually come to appreciate at least one aspect of it: it had changed his life for the better. Even if it hadn't been in the way he'd been expecting when he'd sat her down and said they needed to talk. It had provided the catalyst for him to eventually break ranks with John's obsessive mission, leaving the police department they'd joined together. It had been both a cover and a way to access resources they needed to find Mary Winchester's killer, who they'd only managed to find a first name for: Azazel.

But Dean liked the work. He _loved_ it. While John was dodging calls to dig into old records and using his badge to get away with petty (and not so petty) crimes, Dean had been doing his best to actually help people. It turned out he was pretty damn good at it, too, so he'd transferred to another agency a few states away instead of quitting entirely.

His dad had been furious, but couldn't do anything to stop Dean without revealing his own fraud, and he'd still needed the position. Dean's regret that they never reconciled before John's death balanced with his happiness at reconnecting with Sam, who'd rebelled long before Dean found the courage. John's quest had killed him in the end. If Dean had still been there, it would've killed him, too. Instead, he'd been alive and able to save Sammy when Azazel tracked him down after murdering their father.

That was the exact moment he'd forgiven Cassie. Or at least, the moment that led up to his forgiveness, once the dust had settled and he'd had time to think things through. But he'd never tried the relationship thing again. Never felt the need to, especially since he'd never really stopped having to lie about his past. Sex was awesome, he liked sex, but he didn't miss the rest of it.

No matter what Sam and Jo thought.

By the time he got home, he'd talked himself down from what he could admit was a bit of an irrational panic. It _didn't_ matter what Jo thought, despite the way she'd started looking at him and Cas together the same way her mom did, sometimes. And Sam didn't think anything, because he didn't know about Cas. Never needed to, just like Dean didn't need to know what Sam had got up to (or _in_ to) in his college days before meeting Jessica.

All that mattered was what he thought, and what Cas thought. And like he'd told Meg, they'd been very clear on their thoughts going into it. So if Dean wanted to keep fucking Cas, he'd keep fucking Cas. And if he wanted to spend less non-fucking time with Cas, he'd do that, too.

No strings, no commitment, no broken hearts.


	4. Diamonds on My Windshield

Castiel lay sleepless on his bunk at the station, despite the late hour and the long, busy first day of his shift. He and Gabriel had been on runs nearly non-stop since they clocked in, and he would be an idiot not to take advantage of whatever downtime they'd have before the next one.

He didn't generally consider himself to be an idiot, but sleep wouldn't come.

Waking up without Dean had been both unexpected and unexpectedly painful. The uneasy ache of it had stuck with him all day, leaving him off-balance, but that was unreasonable. No expectations, no attachment. That had been his own suggestion, and that was what they had—what they were doing, he corrected himself, and hated that he needed the correction.

Dean didn't owe him the night, nor an explanation for not spending it. Whether he got called to work or just wanted to sleep in his own bed, he had every right to do so without answering to Cas. If Cas got... emotional about it, it was his own problem and not Dean's. He was complicating things, like he always did, though he hadn't realized just how much he'd slipped until he felt a pang of loss at his empty bed and empty house.

Cas had thought he'd guarded himself against that sort of thing. He knew he was flawed. He tended to get too attached, too quickly, too deeply. His deeper emotions were too eager to surface, and it never ended well for him. Falling in love had only ever led him to heartbreak and abuse, and he'd decided long ago that he wasn't going to put himself through that again. The mess he'd let himself get pulled into with Crowley had been his last relationship, and he wanted to keep it that way. That was why he'd set boundaries with Dean from the start, and if he was starting to cross them, it was no one's fault but his own. Dean was clearly happy with the status quo.

It was still early enough, though. He'd caught himself in time, before he couldn't pull himself back. Before Dean noticed. He didn't think Dean was the sort of person who'd take advantage of him if he learned Cas's feelings ran deeper than they ought to, but he also had a history of being terribly wrong when it came to making judgement calls about people. Medical nuance he could handle with confidence, but he wasn't good at understanding human workings deeper than the physiological.

It was just another reason he needed to keep himself appropriately distant, emotionally. He enjoyed Dean's company, both sexual and otherwise, and losing his objectivity meant losing those. He'd prefer not to, so he'd get himself under control.

"So, Winchester."

Cas startled, looking across the room to find Gabriel leaning up on one arm and staring at him. He hadn't registered the lack of snoring.

"What?"

"You've got your Spock face on. You know," Gabriel expounded with an exasperated expression as Cas looked at him in blank incomprehension, "trying to be a Vulcan but your pesky human side won't let you logic your emotions away."

Cas took a moment to reflect on the tragedy of Gabriel being one of his closest friends.

"First of all, I don't think that's a 'face' I have."

"Totally is. You frown and your forehead gets all wrinkled, but your eyes do this sad, blank thing."

The best and worst part of Gabriel's friendship is how, without even trying, he can read Castiel's efforts to make himself unreadable. It couldn't be helped, given the long stretches of time they spent together on shift, and Gabriel usually didn't push when Cas didn't want to be pushed, but it still made him feel—damaged, inadequate. He couldn't read Gabriel the way the other man could read him.

He changed the subjected, asking, "What does that have to do with Dean?" It only occurred to him after that he probably hadn't changed it far enough.

"Well, Casafrass, I was hoping you could tell me that. As far as I know, not that you go out of your way to give me insights into your personal life," he added pointedly, "loverboy-boyfriend is the only thing you've got going on that might make you make that face. So what's up?"

Cas did make a face at that. "Dean is not my boyfriend."

"Is that the problem?"

"There is no problem." Cas sat up and swung his feet to the ground. He wasn't going to sleep, that much was clear, so he might as well stop wasting time. Trying to decide between working out and baking, he slid into his boots. They fit perfectly, but he untied and re-laced them anyway. When he looked up, Gabriel was still watching him expectantly. "Dean and I are engaging in casual sex, that's all. You of all people should understand that."

"Are you calling me a slut?" Gabriel shot out of bed, hand to his mouth in mock outrage.

"Yes," Cas answered in a deadpan.

He turned, but didn't make it out of the room before Gabriel said, "I'm just saying, evaluate your motivations before they sneak up on you. 'Cause from where I'm standing, you passed 'casual' three months and three nights a week ago."

Cas baked two loaves of egg bread, wearing himself out on the treadmill as he waited for the dough to rise and punching it down perhaps a bit harder than was called for. He used one to make french toast as the rest of their shift started to wake up and the station came to life. The peace was brief, and though Gabriel groaned when both they and Engine Six—Virgil, Uriel, and Hannah—were dispatched to a cardiac arrest, Cas welcomed the distraction.

They spent the next few hours in motion, and Cas was too busy focusing on blood and bones to worry about anything else. When they finally got back to the station, he was exhausted enough to fall into bed with his boots on and sleep until their next call. And so went the rest of the day, and the next night, and he slept for several more hours upon getting home.

Dean didn't join Cas for dinner—which was fine and normal, not something he ought to have done—but he did text, just after nine. It was the first contact Cas had with him since Dean's midnight disappearance, which was also fine, and it read, _**Wanna fuck?**_

 _ **Sure**_ , he replied, glad to have things back to normal.

Fifteen minutes later, Dean was at his house.

An hour after that, Dean was gone.

Normal.

"I'm gonna be busy next week," Dean told him mid-November. "My brother and sister-in-law are coming up for Thanksgiving."

Something twinged just above Castiel's diaphragm; he ignored it. "Of course. Although, if you find yourselves with a free evening, you're welcome to bring them for dinner here."

"Yeah, no, we're on a pretty tight schedule," the other man assured him too quickly, not quite hiding the agitation in his voice. "I'll call you when I've got time again, though."

The lie was obvious and unexpectedly painful. The particularly unsubtle instruction that Castiel wasn't to contact him, more so. Cas grunted some sort of affirmation, and Dean left shortly after with almost no further conversation.

Castiel didn't hear from Dean again until nearly a week into the next month; three weeks he spent at home or work or at the park, not calling Dean or going to the Roadhouse, getting increasingly irritated by Gabriel's increasingly prying questions—and, when those failed to get a response, increasingly childish pranks.

It surprised Cas how difficult the distance was to bear, but he took his lesson from it: getting too close to Dean Winchester wasn't just a mistake because of Cas's issues. Dean did not like it. That was what they had agreed upon, and Cas shouldn't have pushed at it. If Dean wished to resume their arrangement, Castiel would have to do better.

When Dean finally did call, it was to invite him to drinks with Jo and Benny. There were no explanations or apologies for the silence, and Benny's inclusion was both unusual and telling. As far as Cas was aware, Benny had never told Dean how they knew each other—and he was certain that he would've heard about it from Dean if Benny ever had. He didn't think Dean even knew that Andrea hadn't always lived in Greenwood, or that she'd had a drug problem all those years ago. Crowley had been her supplier, not Cas himself, but Benny had seen him in enough compromising (degrading, humiliating) situations that Cas wasn't surprised to have earned his blame and hatred.

For his own part, Cas found it hard to forgive the man when he could still taste blood and semen every time Benny's hard eyes locked on him. Benny had never been one of them, at least not as far as Cas's patchy memory recalled, but he'd dragged his wife out to safety and left Cas to face alone the lust and wrath of whomever was left.

Dean might not know that, but he knew they disliked each other. Cas heard the phrasing of the invitation, went to the Roadhouse and saw the three of them at a booth with the only open seat left for him beside Benny, and he knew his conclusion was correct. Dean was reminding him of his place.

They fell back into a routine without talking about anything, but it was a pattern more closely resembling how they started than how they had been before the intermission. There was sex and drinking and nothing, not even the friendly walks they used to share, that could be misunderstood for a deeper invitation into Dean's life.

Things had started to ease back to comfortability—dinner, Dean staying the night, teasing handjobs in the shower—when Castiel proved to himself yet again that he was incapable of learning from his lifetime of mistakes.

It was late December. Dean had blown him, then fucked him, then collapsed mostly on top of him and they dozed for a while. Cas, unthinking from sleep or sex or both, asked what he was doing for Christmas.

"Man," Dean complained, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling, "I don't know. My brother and his fiancée were supposed to fly up, they're down in California, but he had some stuff come up at work. It's way too late for me to get down there now, so that's a bust. Jo and her mom and stepdad are going on a cruise, Benny's off to Louisiana to see Krissy's grandma... Think it's just gonna be me and Johnnie Walker this year."

"If you have no other plans," Cas began, hesitant. "That is, if it's something you're interested in. There's an annual gathering at my mother's—at Michael's house. Balthazar and I will be attending, of course, and you're welcome to join us."

"Would I be, though?"

He knew Dean wasn't really trying to be cruel, but it still hurt to have that thrown in his face so casually. He was trying to be kind. Dean was going to be alone for the holiday, so Cas was offering him company as a matter of friendship. They were friends in addition to being sexual partners, or had been before Cas's Thanksgiving faux pas. Things had eased a great deal since Dean's initial chill after that, but Cas wanted to feel like he could call Dean his friend again without doubting it in his own mind, as he sometimes did when Dean left his house with barely a grunt of goodbye after spending the night.

He didn't have a large social circle; aside from Balthazar, his only other friends were Gabriel, who he'd met through work, and Meg, who he'd known since high school and reconnected with after getting his life together. One or all three of him would drag him out sometimes, but he didn't tend to seek out new interactions with people on his own. The only reason he'd been at Panthers alone then night he'd met Dean was that Meg had decided it was time for his "bi-monthly dicking."

"Get laid or lose my number," she'd instructed. "You're getting to the insufferable bitch stage of horniness." Then she'd abandoned him for the night.

Cas never had trouble picking up men; between Panthers and a few other nightlife options in Seattle, there was no shortage of guys looking for a fun and easy time. More than that was never on the table for him. Even with Dean, when they'd met again at work, Cas had considered carefully whether to pursue anything further or let it go as an awkward but ultimately forgettable moment. Well, the second meeting had been forgettable; the sex had been spectacular, and that had been the the deciding factor when Cas insisted on handing his report—and his number—directly to Dean.

Sex really had been the only thing he'd expected from it, but Dean's companionship had been as welcome as it was surprising. Now that Cas had experience with being both Dean's friend and sexual partner, he found himself stubbornly unwilling to do without either, even though Dean seemed to think it was impossible to have both. He'd also demonstrated which half he preferred.

Cas would rather have Dean's emotional intimacy than physical, and that realization had been a hard one to swallow. As he was fairly certain both that Dean wouldn't be amenable to that change and that he himself couldn't be trusted to keep his own best interests in mind in any kind of romantic scenario, he couldn't—wouldn't—push the issue.

"Gabriel's come in the past," he told Dean. "Michael considers it a blessing to open his home to the less fortunate during the holidays. And enjoys telling his parishioners about his selflessness," he added, not without bitterness. There were a lot of things Michael lorded hypocritically over his flock, but at least Cas only had to be subjected to it once a year.

The meaning behind Dean's raised eyebrows wasn't apparent to Cas until Dean said, "Well huh. Gabe, really?"

Cas rolled his eyes. "As a friend and colleague, not a sexual partner."

"Oh thank god. Crowley's bad enough, dude, I really don't think my ego could handle what it meant to be on the list of your taste in men when that list also included _Gabe_."

He looked thoughtful, and Cas let him consider. He didn't want to appear overeager and scare Dean off, though he did greedily desire Dean's company, both for its own sake and so that the more conservative and cruel members of his family might be better behaved towards him. Gabriel had acted as a buffer to prevent the worst of their snide comments, at least until he'd gotten drunk and rambunctious enough that they were directed at him instead of Cas. Balthazar's acerbic wit only fueled the semi-dysfunctional fire.

Dean clarified, "So just as a friend thing? Not, you know, _meeting the family_."

"Well, you will be meeting my family." His deadpan response served the double purpose of hiding the mild sting of hurt and making Dean snort a laugh. He counted that as a success.

"You know what I mean, smartass. All right. Sure. I've got nothing else going on. So, just how much family are we talking here?"

"Michael, of course; we'll be at his house. Us, Balthazar. Anna. Our uncle Zachariah and his wife, Hester. Their children, Rachel and Bartholomew, and Bartholomew's wife and twin sons."

Letting out a low whistle the whole way, Dean sat up. "Is that all? Don't get me wrong, that's an impressive number of Novaks, but I kind of expected more from a guy with four siblings. Do they all live over in Eastern Washington?"

"Mostly. Anna's down in L.A. She's flying up in two days and staying here until we all drive over, on the afternoon of the twenty-third."

Cas really ought to have expected the way that information made Dean frown and ease himself off the bed, searching out the jeans he'd discarded long ago. But he hadn't, considering the statement a harmless one until Dean reacted to it.

Giving Cas a nicely distracting eyeful as he bent to retrieve his boxers and pants, Dean said, "I'll stay out of your hair for a few days, then. What time do you want me here for the trip?"

"You don't have to make yourself scarce. In fact, since you have the days off, maybe you could keep her company."

It was a terrible idea. He knew it was a terrible thing to say as soon as the words escaped him. All it could do was make things worse between him and Dean. But he felt compelled to finish, once he'd started; trying to take it back would just alert Dean that there was something wrong.

So he explained, "I'll be working, and it's best if Anna and Balthazar aren't left alone for too long."

"You want me to hang out with your family without you?"

He understood Dean's incredulity, given that the man hadn't wanted Cas to spend time with his family even _with_ him there. But he swallowed down the bitterness he had no right to and shrugged.

"You'd be good at showing her around the city. She's never been."

That seemed to surprise Dean. "Haven't you lived here for a while?"

"Yes, and Balthazar for longer. But she has a busy schedule, so she usually flies directly to Spokane. Since she has a longer break this year she wants to finally visit, but I couldn't get the time off."

Dean had paused in his efforts to get clothed, coming to stand at the corner of the bed with his jeans on but unbuttoned. Cas, having already given over to his worst impulses of the day, figured he might as well write off sense entirely. He reached out and snagged Dean's belt loops smirking up at him.

"And she'll be able to tell you all kinds of embarrassing stories about Balthazar that I was too young to remember."

That point was almost enough to convince Dean. The rest of what it took turned out to be incredibly enjoyable, and left Dean's pants abandoned again.

Dean even accompanied him to the airport to pick up Anna when her flight got in. She looked as Hollywood as ever, greeting him with a visibly fake smile and a hug that barely made contact. She turned to Dean immediately, looking him over and nodding her approval. Cas had told her Dean would be joining them, offered a few details about him. He hadn't mentioned their sexual relationship, but Anna was likely to pick up on it regardless; she had a sense for things like that.

"Castiel, won't you introduce me to your friend?" Her slight smirk, too mild for Dean to recognize without knowing her better, indicated that she had indeed picked up on it.

Obedient and resigned, he gestured between them. "Anna, Dean Winchester. Dean, Anna Milton."

"Milton, huh?" Dean asked, shaking her pale, perfectly manicured hand. "Will I get to meet Mr. Milton?"

"Oh, no," Anna laughed. "Inias and I have been divorced for years, I just kept the name. Turns out, he was gay the whole time!" She laughed again, and as Dean joined her, he missed the flash of her eyes that cut through Cas.

After a short, reasonably pleasant dinner of fairly mediocre Italian food on the way back to town, they parted ways—Dean to his apartment and Cas and Anna to Cas's house. In preparation for her arrival, he'd set up the couch with pillows and blankets and swapped out the sheets on his own bed for fresh ones. Since he'd be gone for two of the three nights, it only made sense to give her the proper bed. He'd take the couch that night, then be sleeping at the station the next couple anyway.

The shift went by quickly, particularly since he kept getting texts during the days from Dean and Balthazar, each complaining about the other. Anna didn't contact him, but he was assured by both men that they were keeping her entertained.

He had planned to pick up groceries on the way home, but instead he drove straight to the house. He'd gotten a text from Dean just before the end of his shift— _ **Sucks about the OT, see you in a few hours**_ —so he knew what to expect. He was quiet as he turned the key and went down the hall to his bedroom. He was not surprised when he opened the door. He was not surprised, nor was he angry or sad; he was only empty. Dean lay naked on Castiel's bed and Anna knelt astride him, going still as they both turned at the sound.

He ignored Anna's falsely surprised, "Castiel!"—she was a consummate actress, but she could never lie to him—and Dean's hissed, "You said he was holding over,"—directed at her, not at him. He ignored the sight of his lover still inside his sister, hands quickly falling away from her breasts. He ignored the single suitcase lying open at the foot of the bed: his clothes and Dean's, neatly separated but packed together in preparation for the afternoon's trip. He ignored the portrait of three young, blue-eyed faces smiling above them—there should have been five, but Anna's head blocked her own image as well as his.

He ignored all these things, and only said, "Pardon the interruption," his voice as blank and emotionless as he was, and then closed the door and left the house.

He heard a series of crashes and someone running after him, Dean's voice calling, "Cas! Castiel!" The front door rattled open behind him, and he didn't have to look to know that Dean was there, shouting for him, naked for all the neighbors to see, but daring to step no further. Anna had made no move to follow, likely tidying herself up in his bathroom.

Getting into the car brought Dean into his peripheral vision, and he was hit by a sudden need to look at the man one last time, to complete the scene in his mind. As it was the only thing to cut through the dull vacancy where he once held hopes and desires, he gave in to it. Framed in the doorway, his dignity protected only by a ridiculously bright yellow condom, he stared after Cas with a frown that more resembled frustration than remorse. Cas felt the place between his lungs where that should hurt as a small but paradoxically dense void.

He drove to Balthazar's house, because there were things he must do, matters to arrange, before he could be alone to consider everything. Once there, the brief recitation of facts went as well as could be expected.

"I'm going to kill them. Both of them. Jesus, Cassie!" Balthazar broke off his frantic pacing to envelop his brother in a crushing hug. "I swear to you, no one will ever find the bodies, or any pieces of the bodies—"

"Stop." Cas was stiff in his brother's arms, not returning the embrace but not fighting it. He only bowed his head, resting a cheek against Balthazar's neck, and his voice was rough as he repeated, "Just stop. I know you're trying to help, but. I don't need you to get involved. I just wanted you to know why I'm not coming home. Please, don't tell Michael."

"You shouldn't be the one exiled," Balthazar snapped, but he didn't continue the familiar and worn argument, instead ending with, "I'm sorry, kiddo. I wish we had all done better by you."

Then Cas did pull away, but gently, resting a hand on his brother's shoulder. "I know you did the best you could."

"That's exactly the problem," Balthazar sighed.

"Will you drive her to Michael's? Just pick her up from my house and go."

There were many things Balthazar must have been straining not to say, mostly related to his own desire to skip the three-hour drive accompanied by a sister he was furious with to a gathering of extended family he wasn't overly fond of on a good day. Cas saw his struggle, saw the moment he gave up the fight against the selfishness that even Cas could admit was a part of his nature. "Fine. Fine, yes, I'll bloody go and take the bint with me. You'll stay here?"

"Just to rest, then I'll go to Meg's for tonight and tomorrow," Cas countered. If Balthazar thought he was lying, he once again overrode instinct and allowed it to stand. "Thank you, Balthazar."

"Don't thank me," his brother grumbled back. "If I'd any sense at all, I'd be off to commit felony assault right now. Go to sleep before I change my mind."

Obeying was easy, and Castiel thought of nothing as he lay in the guest room, staring at the wall until his eyes closed. When he woke, Balthazar had gone, leaving a note urging Cas to call if he needed anything; Cas left it in place and departed.

After parking his car down a cul-de-sac just far enough that Balthazar wouldn't see it, he walked through the quiet neighborhood. Smith-Franklin park was much further from his brother's house than his own, but the distance appealed to him, as did the chill sinking under his skin; he'd left his coat behind somewhere, he couldn't remember where, and his pace was too slow to warm him through exertion.

He navigated without conscious effort, but despite not occupying himself with the journey, he found upon arrival that he could not recall any other thoughts. This suited him just as well as the cold, but realization robbed him of the ability to continue. Instead, he sat overlooking a stand of evergreens and his mind filled with memories and images:

Dean, that first night at the bar, smiling an offer as he bought Cas a drink.

Dean, at the scene of the overdose, unexpectedly awkward but no less enticing.

Dean, in Cas's bed, months into their arrangement, sleeping with an arm draped over his stomach and lips pressed against his shoulder.

Somewhere between those times, it had gone wrong; _he_ had gone wrong, the way he always did. Even now, he recalled the warmth that filled him in those soft, stolen moments, entirely separate from the heat of lust that began their relationship. He felt that same glow trying to rise up his chest as he remembered the mornings he lay there to watch Dean sleeping, and the effort of suppressing it stirred nausea. Then:

Dean in Cas's bed, fucking his sister.

The warring affection and sickness were gone in an instant, replaced by welcome numbness. He reminded himself that he was broken, and it did not disturb the tranquil nothing inside him. He was defective, and he made his greatest mistakes when he forgot that, when he attempted to reach for something more than he was capable of. More than he deserved.

This, now, was how he should be. Detached and calm and impersonal; he ruined everything around him when he tried to emote as though he were a functional human. He'd let himself forget that—no, it was worse than that. He'd run up against his limitations, seen himself pushing the boundaries of what he could have and Dean responding poorly to his attempts, then he'd _kept pushing_.

It started to rain.

Cas wasn't sure how much time passed as he stared at the trees, but it was enough for his clothes to be soaked through and his skin clammy with shivers when something placed itself in his line of sight: Gabriel, bearing a large, colorful umbrella and an exceedingly unhappy expression. He should have been sleeping after their two-day shift, and Cas would have felt guilty that he was in a rain-drenched park looking for Cas instead except that he didn't seem to be capable of feeling anything.

When Cas continued to stare at him silently, Gabriel sighed. "Big bro called me. Well, he called the she-demon, who you're allegedly supposed to be with, but it turns out she hasn't seen you. She's busy getting paid to deal with lunatics, so it fell to me to do it for free."

The weight of Gabriel's expectant stare settled easily over Cas and failed to spur him into action. In the mindlessly processing part of his brain that never shut off, he knew what Gabriel expected from him: a laugh, a sob, a response of any sort. For him to get up off the bench and out of the rain, to talk about his feelings, to yell and curse and wail.

It all just sounded exhausting, and he was already so drained.

Gabriel watched him a bit longer, then held out a sweatshirt, thick and dry under his umbrella. Cas stared at it blankly.

"Put it on, or I'm calling up every person remotely responsible for your medical training—including the dead ones, so help me, there are ways—and telling them that you intentionally gave yourself hypothermia to be melodramatic.

"I'm sorry things are shitty," he added, more gently, "but if you can't take care of yourself right now, please let me do it." Sincerity was an unusual affect on Gabriel, and that more than anything pulled Cas out of his apathy enough to react. He took the offered garment and pulled it on, even managed to drag out a grateful mumble that might have been words. His throat was unreasonably dry for how wet the rest of him was.

Refusing to allow Cas to wallow or refuse, Gabriel dragged him to his feet. "Come on, Tin Man, I'm taking you home. We're gonna drink until you feel feelings, then we're gonna drink your feelings away."

"That seems counterproductive," Cas pointed out. Words came more easily after the first few he had to force out. He failed at many aspects of humanity, but basic communication he could manage. He needed to manage it, to carry on with his life; emotions he didn't need, so he made no effort to bring those back.

"Yeah, well, real boys with functional coping methods get to skip the first step."

"You're mixing metaphors again."

"I'm calling you hopelessly naive and empty inside via Disney characters, asshat. What part of that makes it seem like a good idea to use big fucking words?"

"The most popular Wizard of Oz movie wasn't actually associated with—"

"Jesus, Cas, fucking shut up and get in the car."

As Gabriel drove to his apartment faster and more recklessly than was necessary without emergency lights and siren, he didn't try to engage Cas in further conversation. Instead, he turned up the radio (and the heat) and sang along to the catchy pop tunes of the day. It was what he did when they rode together at work, and the familiarity of it eased tension Cas didn't know he'd been carrying from his shoulders.

Cas had warmed by the time they reached the house, but not dried. In fact, between his shirt and the rain on the way to and from the car, the sweatshirt had grown damp as well.

"Get naked," Gabriel ordered as he closed the door. "The hot water's off for a few hours, great timing there, so I can't stick you in the shower. But I'll get you something clean and dry, and comfortable for passing out in a drunken stupor. Just throw your shit anywhere except where you plan on sitting, I'll deal with it in the morning."

Gabriel's living environment existed as a perpetual state of disaster, so Cas took him at his word and discarded his soggy clothes near the entryway while Gabriel fetched him a new sweatshirt and some slightly too-short sweatpants. There hadn't been much call for modesty between the two of them for years, given that they lived in a five-foot radius of each other for 48-hour stretches at a time, and any remaining body shyness Cas might have had was eliminated by the fact that he flatly didn't care anymore.

Gabriel raised his eyebrows, but didn't complain. While Cas got dressed, he pulled two value-sized bottles of clear alcohol from a cabinet, both mostly full. "Pick your poison."

As the fifth or sixth shot burned its way into his blood, his control started to slip. The carefully held numbness that sheltered him melted into a familiar ache, his chest heavy and painfully hollow all at once. The first stage of Gabriel's plan may have worked, but he knew without a doubt that the second would not. No amount of cheap vodka would drown the throb that accompanied every heartbeat, he knew that from experience. Years of increasingly stronger drugs had failed to silence the soundless scream that echoed deep within his ribs.

But for tonight, he could throw himself into the alcohol and the pain until he forgot the cause of it.

"Gabriel," he said, but it didn't sound right. The later vowels got lost when he couldn't work up the energy to move his tongue away from his alveolar ridge after the R, since he'd only have to put it back for the L, so it came out slurred, "Gabrrrl."

Gabriel, unfairly sober for a man with less body mass and just as much alcohol in him as Cas, grinned and pushed a glass of water at him. Cas scowled, gulped a mouthful, and tried again. "Gabe, why're you doing this?" He flailed the unoccupied hand in a gesture that probably failed to clarify the subject of his question as much as he'd have liked.

Gabriel's mouth moved, but he didn't seem to be saying actual words. Cas tried to tell him the the noises he made had no meaning, but he couldn't get his own words out, either, and the world faded to fuzzy darkness before he could figure out why.

Castiel awoke with a pounding in his head and a tightness in his chest. He was fairly certain something had died in his mouth overnight, and not at all certain it hadn't been his dignity. Someone, Cas could only assume Gabriel because he definitely hadn't had the presence of mind to do it himself, had shoved a couch cushion under his head and covered him with a tattered and stained blanket.

When Cas could sit up without wanting to vomit, which took an embarrassing number of hours, though at least Gabriel kept snoring in his room through them instead of subjecting Cas to his presence, he knew he had to retrieve his car and go home. Balthazar and Anna would have left the day before. Dean—

Cas tried to let the pain that came with thinking of the man wash over him, a current over an unmoved river stone, but instead it broke against him in a wave of acute sorrow. He was still unstable from drinking his guard away; he would have to rebuild it.

Maybe Dean had gone with them. Most likely, he had not. Even if Anna had offered, Balthazar would have refused to take him. Even knowing Dean had probably been left behind, Cas wasn't surprised to find him gone from the house when he arrived. Nor that all trace of him—spare clothes, a toothbrush he'd taken to keeping in Cas's bathroom—had vanished as well. It seemed appropriate for his home to feel as gapingly empty as his chest.

Dean didn't call or text. He didn't stop by. Cas didn't expect him to, really, but he still noticed every hour, every day that passed with the knowledge that Dean was no longer any part of his life. He couldn't regain the numb acceptance that had settled into his bones that first day; it _hurt_ , and he couldn't get it to stop.

He hated it. Hated that he'd let himself become vulnerable again, dared to hope for something meaningful with Dean when he'd known from the start that he couldn't have it. Hated that he hadn't been able to control his emotions enough to stop himself from falling for Dean, and hated that he couldn't control them enough to stop himself from missing Dean.

Alcohol didn't numb him, as he'd known it wouldn't, but that didn't stop him from trying. It was a terrible idea; he was prone to addiction. He knew that, but he spent his evenings drinking himself to sleep anyway, because he didn't want to spend them thinking about how broken he was. He didn't turn to pills again only because he couldn't, not with his job—and saving lives was the only worth he had left. For the same reason, he didn't show up to work drunk or hungover.

Naturally, it was the job that brought him back in contact with Dean, as it had done the first time. Medic Five responded to an overdose, because the universe had a sense of humor. This time they couldn't save the patient, because the universe's sense of humor was a cruel one.

Cas didn't notice who the other people on scene were until he'd already called time of death, because he'd been too focused on trying to restart his patient's failed heart. But when he rose from kneeling over the body, he finally took the time to scan the faces around him.

There was a sharp pain as he saw Dean, and though he knew that his sternum remained uncracked, someone had sliced in and peeled away the layers above and beneath to bare his ascending aorta to the elements. It burned with the exposure.

He would've liked to turn away and nurse his wounds in private, but Jo waved him over. Smiling like she was happy to see him, like he was an old friend she'd missed, she came towards him before he could find a way to stop it. Dean followed, looking deeply unhappy. Clearly he hadn't told her anything, or at least not anything truthful. Was he worried she'd take Cas's side? That was a novel idea; she was like a sister to him.

"Good to see you, though I coulda done without the circumstances," she said as she reached him. Cas looked back at the body; Gabe was stuck with it until the private ambulance arrived to take it to the hospital, which also meant he couldn't come to Cas's rescue. "We've missed you at the Roadhouse."

If Cas's laugh came out a little too bitter to pass for polite, well, he thought he ought to be allowed that. Dean's eyes widened at him, then darted over to Jo, a silent plea. Fuck that; he had no reason to make life easier for Dean. And even if he wanted to, even if he did have a reason, it wasn't a reason that mattered anymore. He wouldn't let it stop him from lashing out.

Dean had never seen fit to keep his fucking Cas a secret from Jo, Cas saw no reason she shouldn't know that they weren't fucking anymore.

"I thought it best I do my drinking elsewhere now. I'm sure Dean doesn't want to see me any more than I want to see him."

Caught off guard, Jo looked back at Dean and saw his grimace. "You guys aren't... Something happened?" she asked eventually.

"No," Dean said at the same time as Cas said, "I may have abominably low standards, but even I draw the line at men who have sex with my sister." Cas's voice was louder and angrier, so Dean's answer didn't really matter.

Dean winced as Jo spun on him. "You _what?_ "

The posturing nonchalance of Dean's shrug was almost the sort of thing Cas used to find, God help him, endearing. "She was hot, we're both consenting adults. It's no one's goddamn business," he added with a glare at Cas.

Cas didn't even need to defend himself, not that he necessarily would have. Dean was right, by the terms of their agreement, but that hadn't made it any less gutting. He didn't know of any way to say that that didn't make him sound like a child learning for the first time that life wasn't fair, and he'd learned that lesson long ago.

But Jo spoke up before he could, regardless. "I'd say cheating on him is your boyfriend's fucking business, Winchester."

"He's not my goddamn boyfriend and he never was. It was a one night stand that went on a few nights too long."

"Six months is a lot of nights." Cas wasn't sure if he was arguing or agreeing, but apparently it didn't matter either way.

Dean turned away without responding, face creasing into the same pained look he got on the few occasions he spoke of his father. If nothing else, Castiel reflected, he'd made it into Dean Winchester's book of regrets. As he realized that was the closest he'd ever been—ever would be—to keeping company with the people Dean loved, it forced another broken chuckle from him. He had to leave before it turned into a sob.


	5. Fumblin' with the Blues

Jo hadn't said a word to him that wasn't work-related since she gave him the shiner. No, that was a lie. Every now and then she would meet his eyes as he passed, or answer the phone when he called, or respond to his texts. It was just always with some variation of "You're a fucking asshole," or "Leave me the hell alone," or "You pathetic, cowardly dick."

It didn't make Dean feel particularly great about himself. He confided this to Benny, out for drinks with him one evening. Benny was the only one who would still go out for drinks with him because he'd never had many friends to begin with and apparently his fucking family liked Cas better than him despite his best efforts to separate them.

"I think I'm overdue for a transfer," Dean concluded, "I've been here way too long. Worn out my welcome, I guess."

"Ain't nobody driving you away from here but you, brother," Benny said. Then, because Dean couldn't seem to stop fucking up this life he thought he finally had, Benny got up and looked sad and put down some money and started to leave.

"You didn't even like him!" Dean shouted after him, ignoring how it drew the attention of everyone around them.

Benny stopped, looking back over his shoulder with a twisted expression that Dean didn't recognize. "No, I didn't. But apparently I still liked him a damn sight better than you did."

He left and didn't go out with Dean anymore after that.

"Well fuck him too," Dean muttered a week later into his third glass of whiskey that wasn't Johnnie Walker, in a bar that wasn't the Roadhouse, sitting next to someone who wasn't Jo or Benny or Cas.

He threw himself into work, because despite the months of effort they were still no closer to nailing Richard Roman or his company for the lab-grade drugs pouring into Greenwood. The overdoses had slowed but not halted, and with the last three all they'd found were bodies. Under other circumstances, Dean might've been willing to accept that the victims had shot up alone and had the bad luck to doze off and forget to breathe. That the actual drugs they'd taken were gone from the scene could, at a stretch, be written off as other junkies finding them first and making the best of a bad situation.

But these guys turned up in the usual dopefiend hangouts, where there was no such thing as privacy. And Greenwood's addict population was generally pretty well up on their rights—maybe the dealers tipped them off, or newcomers got a pamphlet or something. Dean didn't care, he was just glad the information on overdose-related immunity from drug charges was out there because usually it meant they didn't hesitate to call for help when someone was in medical trouble.

If people weren't calling, either the ODs were happening elsewhere and the bodies moved, or something (someone) was stopping them.

Dean was still convinced that Balthazar was involved, somehow. He hadn't been caught at anything and no one had implicated him—not that they actually had any witnesses to question—but something was obviously going on. His gallery had been vandalized the night after the last death, windows smashed and all the paintings piled up and torched. That was more than random malicious mischief; it was a targeted, personal message about something, and yet another coincidence that Dean refused to accept.

Or it could have been insurance fraud, but Dean still wasn't willing to rule that unrelated. Unfortunately, it ended up being Jo's case and she wouldn't let him anywhere near it. It didn't really matter; he could figure out what he needed from her reports without her help. And he didn't need to solve that aspect of it, anyway.

He'd figure out how to get Roman, then he'd get the hell out of Dodge. He was ready to move on already, but he had too much of John's destructive righteousness in him to leave with that particular job unfinished.

All the determination in the world couldn't get him very far when there was not a goddamn thing to go on, though. The case felt as stagnant as he did, which left him in even more of a perpetually foul mood. Naturally, since his work life was such a frustrating shitshow, the next time he ran into Cas it was on a day off. Just to ruin that, too.

It was mid-afternoon and Dean wandered through downtown. Needing to get out of his apartment, where he'd spent so much time lately it felt stifling, he'd bought himself a ticket for some mindless action flick. It didn't start for another hour, so he went hunting for a coffee shop or something to kill the time. He remembered at least three in the vicinity, but had never been to them, so he figured he'd try whichever he came to first.

Then there he was, right in the middle of the fucking sidewalk, staring at Dean like Dean owed him something. And maybe Dean owed him a hell of a lot, maybe he didn't; he sure was shit wasn't planning to give him anything. He'd been perfectly clear about what Cas had a right to expect from him: nothing. If Cas had gone and developed feelings, that was his problem, not Dean's. And a terrible fucking idea, as Dean had been quick to demonstrate.

Cas had been the one to go against the spirit of their arrangement, not him. But Dean was the one paying for it. He'd lost his closest friends because Cas threw a tantrum and Jo told everyone about it. For the first time in his life he'd felt like he belonged somewhere, and Cas's issues had taken that from him. He wasn't sure he'd ever be content with his life again once he left Greenwood, but he sure as hell couldn't stay anymore.

Anger overtook Dean's frustration—and his good sense (if he'd had any to begin with, which he was increasingly doubting). He marched up to Cas, who was still standing with his gaze locked on Dean, and got right in his space, closer to him than he'd been since the last time they kissed.

"I don't know what your fucking problem is," he half snarled, past caring about appearances. "I told you you were never going to be anything more than a fuck. You were a good one, sure, but that's all you ever were."

Cas was just full of surprises; he snarled right back. "If you actually believe your own bullshit, you're even dumber than I gave you credit for. Even if we were just friends—and don't you _dare_ deny me that much, not now—you owed me better than that."

"Better than what? Having sex with someone else? That was never—"

"You betrayed me. With my sister. _In my bed_."

And wasn't that just the most Castiel way of phrasing it? Dean probably would have gone with, 'You fucked my sister,' because it had a crude power, and he would have yelled it. Some other people might have chosen, 'You cheated on me,' which was factual and common, and some people would've cried. Cas wasn't common or crude, he was precise and careful and the word _betrayed_ hit Dean with all its wrenching implications.

 _You fucked my sister._

 _You fucked my sister in my bed._

 _You fucked my sister in my bed two days before Christmas._

 _You fucked my sister in my bed two days before Christmas, when I was going to introduce you to my family._

 _You fucked my sister in my bed two days before Christmas, when I was going to introduce you to my family even though you refused to let me meet yours._

 _You betrayed me._

And yeah, Dean figured he did.

"Castiel?" called a hesitant voice from a nearby doorway before Dean had to find a way to respond to that.

Cas's eyes flashed heavenward as though reproaching God Himself for this turn of events. "Dean, Inias Milton," he growled in introduction. "Inias, Dean Winchester. Discuss your shared experiences. I'm going to find a bar with no scruples about over-service." He stormed away, leaving the men too stunned to follow.

"Oh god, you didn't marry Anna, did you?" asked Inias after a beat of silence.

"What? No, I barely know her." Dean couldn't fight the slight flush creeping up his face and Inias's eyes narrowed then snapped wide in realization.

"You stupid, selfish son of a bitch," he accused, stalking closer into Dean's space with each word. "Was it worth it?"

Dean stumbled back a step, panic rising up to meet the shame that soured his throat. Inias followed, ignoring Dean's single-syllable attempts at denial.

"What happened between you and Anna wasn't about you. You know that, right? I was married to her for three years, we were together for six, and it was never about me. It's always been about breaking her little brother's favorite toys."

"You and Cas...?" This was news to Dean. Beneath the shock, there was a slowly boiling jealousy that would have been inappropriate even if it weren't irrational. This was before Cas was his, long before Cas wasn't his anymore. Not that Cas was ever his; he'd made sure of that.

"Yeah, in high school. First boyfriend, first love, first... everything." There was that kick in Dean's stomach again.

"And then Anna." Dean was going to be sick. "What the fuck is that, some kinda incest-by-proxy? Why?"

"I told you, it's to hurt him."

"Her own brother?"

Inias sighed. "You've clearly never met the rest of his family."

"Only Balthazar. Well, and Anna, sort of. I was going to meet them at Christmas, but..."

"But then Anna."

"Fuck," said Dean, and because there was nothing else to say he repeated, "Fuck!"

"Look, I'm off in twenty minutes. Come in, have a coffee on me,"—Inias gestured at the door he'd come from, which turned out to be one of the coffee shops Dean had been looking for to begin with—"and then we need to talk. We're both the worst kind of person, but there's things you need to know if you're going to try and fix this."

"Fix what? I fucked the guy for a while, then I fucked his sister. It's not like it was a thing." He knew he was being a dick, minimizing the importance of everything again, but it came so naturally when he was already feeling like a piece of shit.

"He was taking you to Michael's house. That's a thing. Is that why you did it?"

"Why did you?" Dean snapped back defensively.

"Twenty minutes," Inias repeated, turning to go inside. "Come on."

He did, and Inias brought him a mug of something dark and strong. Oddly spiced, but not bad. Dean watched him as he worked, inappropriate jealousy giving way to (probably still inappropriate) curiosity. Just because Inias thought he could and should try to reconcile with Cas, didn't mean Dean was going to. But he wanted to hear whatever part of the story Inias was willing to tell him, so he waited.

If Cas had a type when it came to men, Dean and Inias seemed to have more in common than either of them with Crowley. At least, in terms of appearance. Though maybe Inias had looked a lot different in high school; some people were always more or less the same, others changed pretty drastically between their teens and twenties. Before Dean could get bored and nosy enough to start stalking the internet for pictures, Inias finished up and sat across from him.

Without preamble, he asked, "How much do you know about Castiel's family?"

"Uh... Super religious. Three brothers. Lucien got kidnapped, Balthazar fucked off to England, Michael's a dick. Anna. Didn't talk about his parents much, I think they're both dead?"

"His mother died a few years ago, yes. His father, well, no one really knows." Inias hummed, sipping his tea and staring silently out the window for a long moment before he spoke again. "Cas's dad left when he was six. The kids were at school, Naomi was at work, and he just vanished. Didn't leave a note, and the only thing he took was his bible.

"His mom always blamed Cas for it. She said it was because he was disobedient and broken. I wish I could say it was really because of her, but it's pretty clear he just couldn't cope with what happened to Lucien. Of course, she blamed Cas for that, too, not that she ever talked about it. Fucking bitch. So Naomi blamed him and made sure all her kids did, too, including Cas himself.

"Anna was daddy's little girl. Of course she was, eight years old and four brothers. She took it hard, and she's never really forgiven him for making her daddy leave. He took away the best thing she ever had."

"So she thinks she's returning the favor?" Dean guessed.

"Yeah. It's not... I mean, it is her fault, but you have to understand, her mom messed her up pretty bad. Naomi pushed all her insecurities and regrets onto this little girl, told her no one would ever love her if she did this or that, that she was worthless if she couldn't please and obey her husband in everything.

"The shit Naomi did to all those kids... I think Balthazar's the only one to come out remotely unscathed, and that's because he ran away a few years after their father left and didn't talk to anyone again until their mom's funeral. And if you've met him, you've seen how well-adjusted he is."

Dean snorted. "I've personally arrested him four times."

"Yeah, that's kinda my point. Cas got the worst of it, especially after they found out about us, about him being gay. Homosexuality is a sin, and all. Naomi was the one who told Anna to 'save me' from her pervert brother."

"Why did you let her?"

Inias shrugged, but there was pain and shame and guilt written into his hunched shoulders. "I was fifteen and outed in a rural high school. My parents weren't as bad as Naomi, but they're religious enough. I was scared, and all these adults were telling me I was confused and risking damnation, and when they started suggesting I'd been led astray by an older boy, a sinner... It was easier to go along with it, start dating Anna and agree with everyone who called Cas a faggot and a freak. So yeah, I fucked that one up."

Dean didn't have anything to say to that. Inias had fucked it up, no question, but he'd been young and scared and in a bad situation. Dean, though. Dean only had his own damn fear of commitment to blame, the same crawling itch that had got to him when he'd stayed more than a year in any place since splitting from his dad. The one he hadn't felt in Greenwood, or with Cas, and the lack itself had been enough to drive him to worry.

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"Cas is a good guy, maybe the best I've ever known. God knows he deserves better than either of us, but... He hasn't had a whole lot of luck. If it's not assholes like us, it's scumbags like Crowley, and for all our faults—" He cut himself off, looking away and blinking suspiciously bright eyes.

"It's fifteen years too late for me," Inias continued once he mastered himself. "But you still have a chance to make this right. I don't think there's a single person in Cas's life who hasn't let him down or fucked him over, and he's forgiven worse."

"He shouldn't."

"No. But he will."

Inias seemed sure. Dean wasn't. Especially when he got home and his phone rang.

"Hey, handsome."

Dean had never understood why people in movies and TV shows pulled the phone away to stare at it, as if that would give them answers. Maybe it was instinctive, or maybe it was just been conditioned into him as the proper response, because that was exactly what he did. "Anna?"

"Yes, hello," she laughed brightly. "Why, were you expecting someone else?"

"How did you get my number?"

"From Castiel, of course! Balty wouldn't tell me. I'm going to be back in town this weekend and I think we should have dinner. There's a new restaurant—"

"Shut up." Dean's mind raced with too many thoughts to process. Cas gave Anna his number. Had it been before, when he was supposed to meet them at the airport? No, that wouldn't have involved Balthazar. It must have been after. She had asked Cas for Dean's number _after_ and he had given it to her. Fuck. "Fuck. No, I'm not doing 're fucking twisted, you know that?"

"I thought you liked me, Dean." He could hear her pout over the phone and it sounded so fake. Everything had been fake, he could see it now, but he'd been too caught up in his need to sabotage the intimacy that threatened to seep into his relationship with Cas. She'd used him just as surely as he'd used her, but that didn't make it any better. He was pretty sure it made it worse, actually, because it made him gullible and easily played as well as stupid and selfish.

"I don't. Don't call me again."

He hung up. The phone rang moments later and he almost broke it with his bare hands in an unexpected surge of rage, but it was Sam, not Anna.

"Work's finally calmed down," his little brother told him cheerfully. "Jess can't take more time off, but I can fly up for the weekend?"

That sounded like just what Dean needed to get some time away from his guilt and his empty apartment. It shouldn't have felt so wrongly vacant; Cas had never even been there. But he wanted company, and Sam would have been his first choice even if he wasn't the only choice left. They'd had their ups and downs, especially low during Dean's years following their dad around hurting people in the name of "justice," but things had been really good the last few years. They were almost as close as they'd been as terrified little kids, when Dean's whole life was about Sam and Sam's favorite person in the world was his big brother.

But they were also closer to Bobby than they'd been since living with him for weeks at a time as kids, and by extension to Ellen and Jo, so it made sense that the first thing Sam wanted to do was have dinner with them. It just also sucked, because Dean and Jo still weren't really speaking.

"It's fine," he lied to Sam's adorably concerned face. "I see them all the time. Let tonight be for them to fuss over you, it's been ages. I'll drop you off, just come find me at the Roadhouse when you're done."

The bar was walking distance from Bobby and Ellen's house. He hadn't been back since his fight with Benny, because he didn't feel up to facing a Singer or Harvelle alone. But with Sam keeping them busy for a few hours, he could finally spend some time in his favorite establishment and maybe even find himself a distraction. He wouldn't take them upstairs, not even with Jo gone, but his car had a big enough back seat for fooling around, and he hadn't gotten laid since... Well. Since.

The Roadhouse was busy—Saturday night, after all—and Dean liked his chances. He saw the dark, mussed hair and hunched spine, and it was close enough to what he needed. He slid into the miraculously empty stool next to the man, affixed his most charming smirk, and nearly finished his, "What am I buying you tonight?" before he had turned enough to see the guy's face. The line faltered into a curse.

"Is this what you do now, Dean?" Cas asked softly. "Hang out in bars and pick up men who look like your ex? That's fairly sad."

"Picked you up in a bar, and you didn't look like anyone," Dean retorted. They sat there for a long time, carefully not looking at each other.

"Dean!" someone bellowed from the doorway, and of course it was Sam lumbering over to him, two hours early.

When he reached Dean's side, Cas surprised them both with a mumbled, "Hello, Sam."

"Do I know you?" Sam asked, and Dean didn't feel guilty for the barely perceptible flash of pain that crossed Cas's face as Cas answered, "No. You wouldn't, would you?" Really, he didn't feel guilty at all. The unbearably heavy silence remained as Cas threw a rumpled handful of bills on the bar and stalked out.

"What was that about," Sam muttered, and it sounded light and rhetorical enough that Dean thought he could get away with a shrug and a puzzled grunt, but no dice. Instead, Sam dropped into the newly vacant seat and stared hard at him, like he held the secret to eternal youth and amicable judges. "Seriously, what was that about? Who was that guy?"

"Just a guy I know from work," Dean shrugged again. "We've hung out a few times, probably recognized you because I mentioned you're a goddamn moose."

"What's his deal?"

"Having a bad day." Bad year. Got involved with this asshole who fucked his sister. "He'll get over it." Like he was clearly over what happened with Inias. Like anyone could ever get over that kind of shit. That kind of _betrayal_.

He'd get over Dean, anyway. That would be for the best, despite Inias's advice. Dean wasn't—he couldn't be that person. He couldn't give Cas all of himself, the truth about his past, and Cas wouldn't want him if he did. It was better to let the whole thing go.

Dean ordered a beer, because whiskey would be admitting he had a problem.

Sam gave him another searching look, but eventually shrugged it off and ordered a drink of his own.

"Dean Winchester," the mocking sing-song voice of Meg greeted from behind them. As they turned, she added, "And you must be Sam."

"Does everyone in this city know who I am?" Sam demanded, only mildly disgruntled. Dean ignored this, but Meg assessed him more closely.

"I take it you've seen Castiel. He was supposed to meet me here."

"Yeah, well, he took off," Dean muttered, downing the rest of his mostly full beer and signalling for another.

Meg snatched the new bottle as soon as it was set down, digging her other hand into Dean's arm. "It was wonderful to meet you, big boy," she drawled at Sam, and was she flirting or just being Meg? "But I'm borrowing your brother for a few minutes. I'm sure you can entertain yourself."

"What?" Sam protested before Dean could, but Meg was already dragging him away. "Hey, man, don't forget I'm staying with you and I don't have keys!" Sam called after them.

"He thinks I'd actually fuck you, that's cute." Meg shoved him into a booth, none too gently, then slid in across from him. She didn't speak for an excruciatingly time, and Dean broke first.

"How... How is he?"

Her smile formed slowly, a vicious curl of sharp lips as her eyes turned into hooded razors. When she spoke, her voice was soft, honey and poison. "I don't think that's any of your fucking business, is it."

It probably wasn't. He hadn't ever wanted it to be—or at least, hadn't realized he did until he'd already fucked it up beyond repair. But it still hurt to have Meg throw that in his face. "Then what the fuck do you want to talk to me about?"

"Oh, sweetie, I don't want to talk _to_ you. I'd be as happy as my cold, dead heart can be if you never opened your mouth again. I just wanted to set the record straight about a few things.

"One: you're not dead because you're not worth it. It's not as a favor to Cas, who doesn't give a shit about you. It's not because we're scared of killing a cop. We could get away with it if we tried. No one would ever find your body.

"Two: from this moment forward, restraining order rules apply. Thousand feet away from home, work, person. You end up in the same place, you leave. Work," she said, rolling over him as he opened his mouth to object, "obviously excepted, but you don't fucking talk to him unless someone who isn't you will die from it.

"Three: you're a fucking worthless human being. But I think you know that."

He had to look away from her knowing smirk. She left without another word as he followed the scattered pattern of circular stains over the face of the scratched and dented table. Sam edged into her abandoned place a few moments later, nudging the untouched bottle of beer at him with a furrow in his brow.

"That looked... rough. Dean, is everything okay? Bobby said he hasn't seen you for a while, and Jo—did you guys have a fight or something?"

"We, uh. Yeah. Kind of. It's not a big deal, you know how we can get."

"Dean," Sam said, softer. He looked so worried, so caring. Like Dean's problems hurt him and he wanted to fix them. Dean couldn't handle that, not when he knew he didn't deserve it.

"It's all right, Sammy. It'll work out. Can we just get outta here?"

"Yeah," Sam agreed even though his eyes still swam with uncertainty. "Sure."

He didn't pry after that. They went back to Dean's, where Dean tossed and turned and drowned in his guilt but couldn't sleep. They spent the next morning quietly in the apartment, catching up here and there but mostly not bothering to fill the silences. That was all right. They were pretty good with silences.

Sam hugged him crushingly hard at the airport, told him, "You really should come down to stay with us soon, Jess is sorry she missed you."

Driving home without Sam left Dean feeling anxious and empty again. He had to get out of the apartment, but he didn't fit to deal with people. He layered up against the cold and went down to the little covered parking bay outside his building to tune up his car. Working on the Impala always centered him; it was hands-on, dirty work and he could see the results immediately. He could fix that little rattle in the exhaust, even if he couldn't fix anything else in his life.

He switched on the police radio scanner he kept in there while he worked. He liked having it tuned to Greenwood's frequency sometimes while he was on his days off, especially since he lived in the city. It meant a bit less catching up on events his next day in, if he could listen to them happening, and he could keep an eye out if there was something going on in his neighborhood.

Less than an hour in, though, he straightened so quickly that he slammed his head on the hood as a dispatch went out for Cas's address.

"—didn't report in for work," Pam's slightly staticy voice came over the scanner, "not answering his phone. A Fire crew went by his residence and his vehicle was there, but no answer at the door. Lieutenant is requesting contact out there to see if we can force entry."

Nearly vibrating out of his skin with nervous energy, Dean set the car to rights as fast as he could, listening for updates the whole time. The rattle could wait. Cas was—

He didn't know if Cas was hurt or in trouble, not really, but he did know Cas was a responsible fucking guy. He'd never been late for a shift the entire time Dean had known him, had never even called in sick. He should've been at work hours ago, and if the station was just calling it in to them, that meant they'd already tried and exhausted their own options. If any part of this was Dean's fault, if something had happened because of Cas running into him the night before, Dean had to try and help.

Then he'd stay out of the guy's life for everyone's sake.

The look on Balthazar's face when he opened the door was enough warning that Dean could have avoided the punch, but he reckoned he deserved it. So once his ears stopped ringing, he swiped a thumb over the blood from his newly split lip and just looked at the other man.

"Yeah, well, thanks for that," Balthazar said after an awkward silence. "But don't think you're forgiven. Though I would appreciate if you didn't arrest me again."

"Can I come in?"

"No."

"Look, I just need to ask you something."

"No, I will not be the third Novak notch in your bedpost. Try Michael, he's got a big enough stick up his ass that you might be able to slide on in unnoticed. Or maybe if you useless assholes had ever tried to find Luci you'd have another shot—" He broke off when Dean slammed a fist against the open door, but kept his sneer.

"Damn it, I know I'm a dick and I broke your little brother's heart—"

"Modest, too," Balthazar snorted. "He's already over you—"

"—and I would literally kill anyone who did that to Sammy," Dean pushed on, "but this is _not about me!_ Have you seen or talked to Cas today? Do you know where he is?"

"And why the fuck would I tell you?"

"He didn't show up for work. He's not answering his phone. His LT had us check his house and his car's there but he's not."

Balthazar's eyes narrowed in a frown. "You're not in uniform."

"It's my weekend, I have a scanner in the car."

"And you use it to stalk my brother, charming. You can still fuck off."

"Look, just... call the station if you know anything, okay? I don't know if you're his emergency contact or if they have any way of getting in touch with you." Dean slumped, turning to leave, but hesitated. He didn't look back all the way, didn't meet Balthazar's eyes when he asked, "You wanna hit me one more time for the road? No charges, I promise."

"No." Balthazar was dispassionate. Wholly unimpressed. "You don't get to play the martyr here, Winchester." He slammed the door on the witty response Dean couldn't quite seem to formulate.


	6. Please Call Me, Baby

Dean spent a miserable evening driving all over the city, worrying about Cas. No one had been home when the police and firefighters had gotten a locksmith out to open Cas's door. He wasn't at any of the local hospitals. Meg hadn't answered any of Dean's calls. Balthazar either didn't call the station or didn't have any useful information, because Cas got entered as a missing person by nightfall.

Dean had looked everywhere, he really had. Every single park in the city, even the nameless neighborhood ones the size of a postage stamp. He checked all the bars, restaurants, diners, movie theaters. He even ran into the cafe where Inias worked—literally ran, he'd been through every store in that downtown corridor in about ten minutes—but nothing.

Eventually he had to call it a night. It was past midnight and he was too exhausted to drive safely anymore. He barely managed to get his clothes off before falling into bed and passing out.

No time at all after that, his cell buzzed near his head and jolted him awake.

"Dick fucking Roman," Balthazar spat as soon as Dean picked up the phone.

Given that Dean's only two hours of sleep in the last day and a half had just been interrupted by this call, he felt justified in remaining groggy and confused. "What?"

"Richard Roman is holding Cas hostage somewhere. He wants money I don't fucking have!"

Wide awake, Dean pulled up yesterday's jeans before Balthazar finished speaking. "Fuck. How bad is it?"

"How—it's fucking bad, you moron! He has Cas!"

"How much do you owe him?" Dean clarified. "How deep in bed with him are you?"

Balthazar's voice cracked as he said, "A few hundred grand."

"You at home?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, I'm on my way. If he calls again, just... Don't promise anything yet, okay? Tell him you need time. I'll be there soon."

Dean had known, he'd fucking _known_ , that Balthazar was involved. He finally had proof, and it would probably be enough to bring all of R.R.E. tumbling down. But he didn't feel vindicated about it when Cas's life was hanging in the balance. He didn't care about the case anymore.

He had a plan worked out by the time he got to Balthazar's. The man looked like shit when he opened the door; Dean was sure he didn't look much better. Pushing aside his doubts, because he needed to be confident to get Balthazar to go along with everything, he guided Balthazar into a soft chair and started strong: "We need to call the police."

Balthazar tried to shoot back to his feet. Dean shoved him down again, a lot less gently.

"They have people trained for this. They can handle the situation better than we can."

"Bull-fucking-shit. Whatever you think you know about how Roman does things, you're wrong."

Dean glared down at him. It might not have been the time to tear Balthazar a new one for getting involved with _Dick fucking Roman_ , but he didn't get to be snide about it when it was his fucking fault Cas could get hurt. Could have already been hurt.

"I know enough. About Roman and about men like Roman. What's the money for?"

Balthazar deflated slightly, looking away. Dean had no time for his shame.

"We know about the drugs. They come out of R.R.E. and they kill people. I can't promise you immunity if you tell me everything you know, because that's not my call and honestly I don't know if you deserve it. But I do know that if you lie to me, if you don't tell me everything you know that could possibly help us, Cas is the one who's going to get hurt. And you care about him too much to let that happen."

Still staring out the window instead of facing Dean, Balthazar started to talk. "He's using the gallery. I tried to tell him no, but—you don't tell Dick Roman no. What happened to Kevin was a warning. And don't start with me," he interrupted himself before Dean could. "I wish it had been me and not the kid, but you can't argue that that made it more effective. I didn't say no after that.

"I never touched them myself. You have to believe that. Not the drugs, not the people. He sent—she called herself a nurse, I don't know her name. They'd give me the money, she'd give them a dose."

Unable to stand being close to Balthazar any longer, Dean let go of his shoulders and took a few steps back. "And it didn't bother you. That people were fucking _dying_ from it!"

"Of course it bothered me!" Balthazar was back on his feet, face a blotchy red as he bellowed. "But it was them or me. Or Kevin. Or Cas. If I got caught interfering, it wouldn't stop him from going elsewhere and doing it anyway, he'd just be doing it after sending someone to shoot up the Trans. So yeah, I let it happen. Those people, they're like me—we make our bad choices and we know they can fuck us up. You risk dying every time you shoot up anyway, I wasn't going to let other people get hurt over it."

It physically hurt him to do it, but Dean pointed out, "Cas used to be a person like that."

Balthazar didn't answer that.

"So why's he pissed at you? Where does the money come in?"

"The break-in at the gallery. It may not have been a break-in, and a case of Dick's vials may have gone missing."

It took Dean longer than it should have to process that, but he got there eventually, as Balthazar continued to stare at him somewhat sheepishly.

"You staged it?"

He shrugged."I figured the insurance money would cover Dick's losses, and at least it stopped his operation for a few weeks. But the investigation's taking too long and he got impatient, so. So he took Cas," Balthazar choked out.

"That's. Shit." Dean rubbed at his jaw, then the back of his neck, taken aback by how touching he found that. "I mean, it was a dumb fucking thing to do, but I guess it was good of you to try. But you really should have come to us. To the police, I mean. And we need to go to them now."

"You think he wouldn't find out? He has cops, you naive little child. He'll kill Cassie if we do."

"Look, we don't have time for this. The longer we wait, the worse it'll get. I'm not Robocop and you're not Liam fucking Neeson, okay? That off-the-reservation shit only works in Hollywood."

"You're a fucking coward. You just want to keep your job, you don't fucking care about my baby brother!"

"I fucking care!" Dean shouted, slamming Balthazar into the wall with an arm across his chest. "I would give my job, my home, my fucking life for Cas if it would do any good, but that is not the way to save him! I'm not going to run in there and get him killed, and neither are you because if you try it I swear to _god_ I will put a bullet in you."

That gave Balthazar pause, but not enough. Dean had to get the message through to him so he wouldn't go running off and ruin Dean's chances of bringing Cas home alive.

"I've seen how that shit goes, you pompous little dick," Dean hissed, remembering long nights in a stale car and the loneliness of never belonging. "Everyone gets broken and no one gets saved. That is very fucking painful personal experience, that's my entire fucking childhood, so you can go to hell. Now will you back the fuck down or am I gonna have to cuff you to your shower?"

Balthazar's eyebrows obscured his forehead and his mouth pursed with a question, but he slowly closed it as Dean continued to glare at him. Finally, he offered an archly drawled, "Kinky," and they both knew that was the best either of them would get.

Dean made the call. Appeasing Balthazar, and keeping in mind the new information about Roman's reach, he opted to skip phoning it in to dispatch. Benny was working, and it took very little explanation from Dean to get him on his way. He would meet with Balthazar, make some calls to members of the command staff they knew they could trust, and get to finding out as much as they could about who was involved and where Cas might be.

It was a good plan. It was the right plan, Dean knew, with the least likelihood of casualties and a decent chance at rooting out Dick's support in the PD. It was also a great backup in case something went wrong on the hunt he was about to start alone. Because he might not be Robocop or Liam fucking Neeson, but he was Dean Winchester, and this was not his first rodeo.

"I'm gonna go check out Cas's house, see if there's anything the guys missed earlier. Something they wouldn't have known to look for without knowing Roman's involved. Swear to me you won't do anything stupid before Benny gets here?"

All Balthazar said was, "You'd better be right about him being trustworthy, or Cas is already dead."

Dean did go to Cas's house to look around, but he didn't stay very long. From what the officers had told Balthazar during the day, it sounded like Dean may have been the last person to see Cas. Meg—who was perfectly happy to talk to cops who weren't Dean—had tried to find him after they missed each other at the Roadhouse, but never managed it. She'd assumed he'd gone home to sulk, driven by his house to confirm his car was there, and left it at that.

Though Dean had been surprised she hadn't tried to talk to Cas then, Balthazar had waved it off. "Her emotional support is more suited to rage than sorrow. She doesn't handle crying particularly well. Usually makes things worse, really."

So Dean spent a few minutes looking around Cas's house and car, but he didn't find anything useful. The officers actually working the case would be able to check for prints and maybe see if Cas had driven it home himself or not, but Dean couldn't see an indication either way. He didn't know where Cas had gone after the Roadhouse, he didn't know if Cas had been taken from right outside the bar or from his house or from somewhere in between, so he couldn't start the investigation from that perspective.

He went back to his own apartment and stood in front of the closet, staring down at the dark duffle bag stored there. He hadn't touched it since parting ways with John, except with each move to a new city. He'd also never unpacked it, because for all his determination to move on with his life, he still had an itching worry in the dark reaches of his mind that something could happen and he'd need it again.

And there he was, needing it again. He didn't bother to check the contents before hefting it out of the back corner and carrying it down to the Impala; he knew what would be inside. Three pistols bought off the books from pawn shops in three different states, serial numbers filed down. Ropes. Knives. A combat first aid kit with narcotics prescribed in someone else's name that were probably expired by at least a decade. An unopened box of nitrile gloves. A prepaid burner phone, never before used, that not even Sam had the number for.

Covered by the parking bay and the darkness, he wrestled the bag into the false bottom of the car's trunk. Then he called the phone company and, in a statement made under penalty of perjury, lied his ass off to get the last ping location of Cas's cell.

He left his own phone behind. Benny would undoubtedly try to track it as soon as he realized he couldn't reach Dean, then come looking for him. It might buy him a bit of time before they repeated trick on Cas's phone, which would give him a chance to get to the area and look around before it was flooded with cops.

The coordinates he'd been given for the ping led him to a skeezy looking hotel just outside city limits. It was on one of the main roads that had been a highway in the fifties, and looked like it hadn't seen much in the way of upkeep since then. The lights and vacancy sign were on, but Dean saw no one at the desk when he looked through the glass doors to the lobby. They, too, were in a bad state, so cloudy with built-up dirt and who-knew-what-else that they looked frosted from a distance. Despite their questionable appearance, the doors gave way when Dean pulled one side open; unlocked.

His first impression hadn't been wrong: there was no one to be seen inside the lobby. Spine prickling with unease, Dean gave in to the urge to do away with subtlety and pulled out one of his handguns, holding it low and ready beside his body as he circled around the desk. The small staff room was also empty, as were the breakfast area and kitchen. Though every room flickered with fluorescent strip lighting, none of the appliances were powered on. The TVs were covered in thick layers of dust and even the microwave and oven clocks were dark.

Once he'd determined that the common areas, women's restroom and all, were completely vacant, Dean started down the hallway on the first floor. Every single door hung slightly ajar, opening just a crack into the dark rooms. If not for how creepy the whole thing was, Dean would have been impressed at the setup. He was even willing to bet the second floor was in the exact same situation. It was perfectly designed to either waste his time or have him walk into an ambush. Or both.

Roman was a smart psychopath. He hadn't trusted Balthazar not to go to the cops, and he'd known what one of their first steps would be. Even with a tactical team, clearing the hotel would take precious time. Hell, just getting them called out and set up to go in would be nearly an hour in the middle of the night. He'd have more than enough time to kill Cas, ditch the body, and get cozy in bed before anyone came knocking.

Then again, chances of him doing his own dirty work in the first place were slim to none. Roman might be the mastermind, but Dean had no idea who he'd actually be coming up against on the way to Cas. Who probably wasn't even in the hotel.

Dean dithered and hated himself for it. If Cas was there and Dean left without checking, he'd never forgive himself. But if he wasn't, and Roman had someone watching the hotel who'd been tipped off by Dean's arrival, then he didn't have a lot of time to try and come up with a better location. He might not get there—wherever there could be—before it was too late. He'd never forgive himself for that, either.

Gritting his teeth against the frustrated curses that wanted to burst uselessly into the world, he started clearing the rooms. He had nothing, absolutely nothing better to go on.

It was as slow of a process as he'd feared. He had to push into each blacked out room from behind the door, switch on the light while praying he didn't get shot or blown up, then search each bathroom, closet, and bed frame for any sign of Cas. He made it up to the second floor without any luck, either good or bad.

Then, halfway down the hall, it happened. He burst into a room on the right and when he flipped on the light, he saw a phone propped up on the bed. Stupidly, unforgivably stupidly, he skipped clearing the bathroom and closet to rush over and pick it up. John was probably rolling in his grave by the time Dean realized what he'd done, and by then it was too late.

He didn't get a chance to get his gun up, or even to finish turning around to see his doom, before the needle sunk into his neck. "Shhhh," a warm voice soothed as the world faded grey, then black.


	7. Depot, Depot

Dean came to slowly, his head pounding and lethargic. His awareness of the situation filtered through his sluggish mind in stages.

His arms hurt. They supported all his weight, because he'd been strapped like an X into a large metal frame, like the squat rack in the PD's gym. His ankles were tied in too, but he had enough wiggle room to brace his feet on the lower bar so he could take some of the strain off his wrists. His legs wobbled a bit, but didn't buckle. Whatever he'd been dosed with seemed to be wearing off.

Directly in his line of sight, placed just right for it to catch his attention the moment he started to lift his head, was an old, rusted cot-style bed. It didn't have a mattress; the dark-haired body on it rested directly on the uncomfortable and equally rusted springs.

"Cas," Dean croaked. He cleared his throat, tried again—"Cas!"

Cas didn't move and Dean panicked before his eyes caught on the silver pole just beside the bed. Two or three plastic tubes ran from the I.V. stand and down towards Cas, probably going down into his arm. Dean's vision still swam a little and he couldn't see that side of Cas from the angle they were at. The I.V.'s presence was both terrifying and reassuring; it probably meant Cas was still alive, and whoever had them was interested in keeping it that way. But Dean had no idea what was in any of the bags feeding liquid into Cas, and that meant it could be anything. Dick Roman's magic heroin, for instance, and that was a sickening thought.

They were in some kind of warehouse. Of course they were. It wasn't large; maybe fifty feet across, sparsely lit, with rust-red sheet siding. It wasn't until his second look around the building, trying to find anything useful, that Dean noticed the man watching him from the corner.

The man's face twisted into a grimace of a smile and he moseyed over to Dean, taking his time. He stopped to look down at Cas, still motionless on the cot. He was tall and gaunt, a scruffy beard making his cheeks look even more hollow. In Dean's professional opinion, and he had quite a lot of experience to back it up, he looked batshit crazy.

"Don't worry, he's just sleeping. For now. I wanted a chance to chat, you know. Just the two of us. We have a lot to talk about, Dean."

"I didn't realize I was on a first name basis with any of Dick's dicks."

Dean flashed the man a careless grin, because he wasn't yet hurt that badly and anything else would be an admission of how terrified he was. The man smiled back, more of a lopsided baring of teeth, and leaned in close enough for Dean to feel his humid breath.

"No, but you and your daddy got real close with my brother."

It took Dean some time, because he and John did a lot of shit to a lot of guys on his way to finding Mary Winchester's killer. He pulled back as far as he could to study the man's face, and when he saw the resemblance it knocked the wind from him. "Azazel." He really wished his voice hadn't cracked there. "You're Azazel's brother."

"The name's Alastair."

Azazel's brother was bad. Azazel had been the one to kill John, tried to abduct Sammy, and Dean had killed him. He'd been working at a department in California by then, reunited with his brother but still not talking to his dad, and Dean had been awarded a medal for his bravery because no one had known the truth of everything he'd done to get to that man—if he could be called a man. More like a demon, and it looked like his brother was no different. Dean had left for yet another agency barely a month after the shooting, as soon as the investigation had cleared him.

"This was never about fucking Balthazar," Dean realized. He was such a fucking idiot. He got caught in this trap trying to keep that douchebag safe, and he'd played right into this psycho's game.

"Mr. Roman thinks it is," Alastair crooned, taking a moment to lovingly polish something long and silver on his sleeve. He held it up to catch the light, sharp glint blinding Dean just enough that he couldn't make out the shape, but he had some ideas and he didn't like them. "It's the only reason he agreed to let me snag the brother. But I knew you'd come. Couldn't leave your little angel here at our mercy, not you. Not John Winchester's son."

"You're about a month late on that, jackass. Didn't you hear? He dumped my ass."

"Ah, but here you are nevertheless."

He had him at that. There Dean was.

Maybe if Dean had had a clever answer for that, it would've delayed what came next. It wouldn't have stopped it, though. Alastair was a man on a mission, and while Dean didn't know the endgame, he had some pretty good ideas. He was only shaky on the details, and Alastair spent what felt like a few hours filling those in for him.

When he finally left, Dean was naked and bleeding from all the places Alastair had cut away his clothes. The cuts were shallow, more sting than pain, and that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Alastair had taken his time, waiting for Dean to recover from each slash before making the next one. He'd been agonizingly patient and that didn't bode well for Dean's future, or Cas's. Though Cas was still largely unharmed, other than whatever was being pumped into him to keep him sedated.

Dean lost track of time long before Alastair came back, forced into a half-slumber by sheer exhaustion. When Alastair did return, he woke Dean with a backhanded slap that left his jaw aching and his ears ringing. Then there was more of the same, for what felt like days: Alastair would hurt him, not enough to damage but enough to convince Dean he meant it, then leave them alone for long stretches.

At one point, what seemed like early on, he fitted Dean with an I.V. to match Cas's. When Dean tried to struggle away from the needle, Alastair calmly let go of him and walked over to the cot instead. His knife flashed off the table and across Cas's chest before Dean could call him back. The tip barely grazed Cas, just leaving the thinnest welt of pink, but it was enough to make Cas whimper and twitch in his forced sleep.

Alastair looked back at Dean with a raised eyebrow and Dean nodded, eyes down. He had a weak spot and it might get him killed, but he had no delusions about making it through this alive anyway. Maybe Cas would, if he played it right. Maybe the police would find them in time.

As he deftly placed the line, Alastair explained, "It's just some nutrients, fluids. It's just so handy to be working for a drug company for things like this. Don't want you dying on me before I'm ready, you know how it is."

That stage of their relationship lasted for at least a few days, as far as Dean could tell. He and Cas had both soiled themselves a couple times, though at least Cas wasn't awake for the indignity. The smell didn't seem to bother Alastair, who carried on with the little tortures—and Dean really didn't like knowing he had worse to look forward to. It made him almost grateful for when things stayed at the same level instead of escalating, and he knew damn well how Stockholm worked.

Fortunately, Alastair talked a lot when he was there, and that helped to keep Dean hating him the right amount.

"I'm shocked that Greenwood took you, I really am. They usually have..." He darted his tongue across his lips, somewhere between hunger and nerves. "Higher standards. Though they did take your boyfriend here, and between you and me, he's pretty cracked."

"We've still passed more psych evals than you, buddy."

"So'd your daddy," the creep retorted, and fuck him because that had always lurked in the back of Dean's mind. "But Azazel took care of that. Then you,"—He cracked the smallest finger of Dean's left hand in a very unnatural direction.—"took care of Azazel."

"He killed my mom. He almost killed me. He killed my dad. Then the stupid son of a bitch went after my little brother," Dean ground out when he could speak past the pain. "I'd do it again."

That was probably a stupid thing to say, especially given that Alastair had already stepped things up. Breaking bones was new. But it had been—he didn't actually know how long, but it seemed like a while—since Alastair's first reminder that Dean's disobedience didn't result in punishment to Dean. He never actually forgot Cas was there, but he tried not to think about it. It couldn't possibly be healthy to be kept under for that long.

So when Alastair's sneer melted into a snarl, he expected retribution. He didn't expect it in the form of Alastair stepping away from him and walking over to Cas instead.

"Shit. No, please, I'll—"

"Shut up!" Alastair yelled without turning back. It was, surprisingly, the first time he'd raised his voice during the whole ordeal. That didn't bode well for whatever he had in mind for Cas. Alastair had everything planned carefully and had indicated a few times that he was saving Cas for something, but if Dean had provoked him into breaking from the agenda in anger there was no telling what he'd do. But all he did, after raking his eyes over Cas's sleeping form, was fiddle with the I.V. settings.

With an ominously cheerful, "Have fun," he left. He didn't always leave the lights on when leaving Dean and Cas alone in the warehouse—or leaving Dean alone, since Cas was present but hardly company—and the times when he didn't meant Dean couldn't see a damn thing. The building had no windows, not even a crack or badly joined seam in the siding to let daylight reach them. Dean hadn't known if it was day or night since getting nabbed at the hotel, and h couldn't guess how long ago that had been. Maybe a week, maybe more.

This time Alastair left him with the gift of light, and Dean could only assume it was a punishment. Heart pounding, he waited for Cas to start seizing or aspirating. Something awful was about to happen and the premonition left his lungs hurting worse than his cracked finger. He couldn't get to Cas. It was far too late to stop whatever Alastair had done even if he'd been able to break free. He waited and waited.

Minutes passed that felt like hours, or maybe they were actual hours, and nothing happened. Cas kept breathing. Finally, after Dean had convinced himself that Alastair was just fucking with his head but before he could bring himself to drag his gaze away from Cas just to be sure, Cas moved. It wasn't much; rolling to his side a little, groaning in a rusty voice. He was waking up.

"Cas?" No reaction. Darting his eyes to the door and not seeing any sign of Alastair's return, Dean said it again, louder.

Muddled blue eyes cracked open and sought him out, blinking the long, fluttering blinks of the mostly asleep, but eventual his gaze focused on Dean and sharpened. He didn't sound great, but he managed to ask, "Dean? What's..." before breaking into a fit of coughing that looked painful.

"Hey."

Cas tried to sit up—he wasn't even strapped down, but he didn't have the strength for it. That didn't surprise Dean, not when he'd spent so long sedated on the bed, fed only by the drip in his arm.

"Don't try to move yet. You're, uh. You've been drugged. Sleeping for a while. I wish you weren't here, but fuck, it's good to see you awake."

Giving up on sitting, Cas settled for shifting himself to be looking more directly at Dean. "Dean."

"Yeah?"

"What the fuck is going on."

Dean explained the best he could, given how long and not quite settled that story was. "We've been abducted by a guy who probably wants to wear my skin as a dress. I think you're insurance, and I'm so fucking sorry to have gotten you caught up in it."

The door banged open before he could get any further and Cas flinched back, startled. Dean's gut filled with lead.

"Don't look so sad, my boy," Alastair told him almost tenderly. "I'm not going to start hurting him. Really, if I get my way, I'm never going to hurt him. I just want him to watch. I want you to know he's watching."

From that point on, it was a crapshoot any given day whether Cas would be awake or not when Alastair came to work Dean over. He usually knocked Cas out again before leaving the building, but sometimes—probably just to be fucking contrary—he did the opposite. Had Cas sleep through Dean's beating, then switched off the sedative as he departed.

"Hey," Dean called softly one of those times, when Cas was just starting to stir.

He looked around before meeting Dean's gaze with a confused frown, like he wasn't sure Dean meant it for him.

Dean was pretty sure some of the effect of his own incredulously wide-eyed response was lost from one of them being swollen shut. "Seriously, dude, who the fuck else would I be talking to here?"

Instead of answering, Cas asked, "How long has it been? Are they still looking for us?"

"Fuck, Cas. I dunno. I really fucking hope so."

It wasn't the most reassuring answer, but Dean expected some response other than Cas tilting his head thoughtfully from the bed. "You don't expect to live through this."

Dean would've shrugged if he could, but the numbness of his shoulders and the way his wrists were still strapped above his head prevented it. "It's not looking good." Might as well be honest. "I'm hoping you will, though. If that's any consolation."

"I like sharing time," Alastair announced from a corner in both of their blind spots. He'd been gone. Dean had been so _sure_ he'd been gone. "You should tell him something awful and painful, it'll be a great bonding experience."

Dean watched him amble over to Cas's bedside, passing a razor idly back and forth between his hands, and knew it wasn't a suggestion.

"My mom—"

"Mmm, no. Your brother."

"Oh. Uh, okay. Sam left us when he was eighteen and I didn't see or talk to him again for about four years. He and our dad—"

Cas cried out when Alastair's razor cut across his stomach and Dean shut up, frantic. He'd done what Alastair wanted, why... He closed his eyes and licked his lips nervously before looking at Alastair again.

"Sorry. I got it.

"We had a brother. Me and Sam. Half-brother. This kid, Adam. Our dad never told us, but I guess he had a thing with this woman, a while after Mom. And he never told us about the kid, never told me I had another brother. Not even when Sammy walked out on me and dad just told him to never come back, even though that's when he went to see Adam for the first time. I found that out, later. He told me he had 'shit to do' and just fucking took off, and I was just alone in another fucking motel with no one left. My brother hated me and my dad didn't give a shit, but at least they'd been there, you know? I'd never actually been alone, fucking abandoned, before. And he just fucking left me, the same night Sammy did, to go give it a try with his new family.

"Didn't work. John Winchester was still John fucking Winchester, he was back in a week, but he still never told me. You know how we found out?" It was a rhetorical question, but Dean still paused, swallowing down the tears that threatened to choke him. "Last year, more than a year after he died, someone called him—I kept his phone—a neighbor or something. Kate—the woman—had left his number as an emergency contact, I guess she didn't know. And this guy, he was looking for Dad because he was their next of kin. Adam and his mom had just been killed in a car crash.

"He was seventeen.

"I never even met my baby brother, but I got to bury him."

He had no idea why Alastair wanted that story. He didn't even know how Alastair knew that story. But the sympathetic look in Cas's eyes was nearly enough to break him and maybe that was it.

Days later, Alastair was carving something into Dean's back and he was yelling impressively violent threats in a manly fashion. Or he had been, however many hours ago, back when Alastair started. Now he was just screaming.

"There's something special about you, Dean," Alastair told him once his throat was too raw for anything other than gasps of pain. "Your daddy, he just did what he had to. But you enjoyed it, all those bad men you hurt. I think you'll enjoy hurting good men, too."

That was it, Dean realized. That was why he'd kept Cas there and alive. He didn't want to torture Cas because he wanted Dean to torture Cas, and that was never going to happen. He refused and he kept refusing. Only, every time he refused, things got worse for him.

After the sizzling died down to an occasional crackle, Alastair pulled the still-glowing poker away from Dean's back. Most of the blackened, blistered skin beneath came with it. Dean hadn't really stopped screaming—trying to scream, his throat was torn too raw to produce much sound anymore—since the first touch of the heated metal to his foot. He didn't know how long it had been, or how many times the iron was held in the torch and thrust against him, but he knew Alastair had slowly worked up to the space between his shoulder blades.

He sobbed in relief when Alastair threw the poker to the ground instead of preparing it again and didn't care about the mocking laugh that earned him. It was only a moment of respite before his tormenter was back, running a possessive hand over his chest and then around, pushing rough fingers into the raw and charred wounds.

"I prefer blood," Alastair confessed, "But there's something wonderfully poetic about having you burn. Tomorrow's going to be so good, I think we'll wake your boyfriend up for it. Unless you're ready to reconsider my offer?"

It was weak and shaky, more of a whimper than a statement and so quiet that he wasn't sure Alastair could hear it even with his face mere inches away, but the word that ghosted across Dean's lips was still, "No."

Alastair smeared thick fuel down the right side of Dean's back and when it hit the previous day's brands they flared up as though freshly burning. He jerked against his bonds in a futile attempt to escape the pain searing down to his core, spine cracking as he tried to arch it away, but the gel clung to him. It felt like fire consuming him, driving his entire existence down to that patch of tortured skin.

Then there was a rasping click behind him, and his last conscious thought was of just how wrong he'd been. It hadn't felt like fire at all. Flames, real and bright and vicious, licked greedily over him as Alastair touched lighter to fuel, and all he knew was agony and screaming.

When he resurfaced, he hurt everywhere. His back was frighteningly numb, but the area around the void was a sea of phantom flames and sharp, pulsing pain. His wrists and ankles were bloody and swollen, torn as he struggled in the restraints. His muscles screamed in sore fatigue, so complete and encompassing that he must have been thrashing, seizing against the rack. His throat, shredded and dry, was surely unable to voice even his screams anymore.

When he'd recovered enough to have thoughts that were more than silent wails of agony, Alastair tried again.

"I'll even make it easy for you. One little cut, that's all you have to do. Slice him up a little, barely anything—or I burn you again."

Dean couldn't—he couldn't take it again. And it would be so easy. "Yes," tore out of his broken throat. Alastair let him down, gently as a nursemaid, helped him walk over to pick up a scalpel and approach Cas's bed.

"Oh, and Dean? Try anything chivalrous and you'll watch while I fuck him to death." Alastair eyed Castiel's barely conscious form with a curled lip, but melted it into a leer when he looked back to Dean. "He's really not my type—I prefer my cunts with curves attached—but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make to prove my point."

Cas was awake. Of course he was, that was the whole point, and he looked terrified and tired and heartbroken, but all he said was, "It's all right, Dean. I understand."

Alastair was right behind, waiting to see what Dean would do. What he did was spin on shaky legs and slice across Alastair's neck as best he could. He didn't think he'd hit anything vital, but it was enough to send Alastair reeling and Dean managed to haul Cas to his feet before he recovered.

Then something slammed into his side, making him double over as his vision whited out. Cas fell to his hands and knees, legs unable to hold his weight after such a length of inactivity.

Dean had been winning bar fights since he was thirteen. Well, not so much lately, since it was kind of frowned on in his line of work, but sometimes he still had to end them. He had taken down four guys while drunk before, he'd even beat two with a broken arm, but he'd never gone into a brawl starting out in this bad shape. He couldn't win this one.

But he could make it last. He could buy time. He could make sure Cas got out, if the fucker would just—"Fucking run!"

He paid for his distraction with another blow, some heavy and metallic object catching him in the shoulder. Something cracked; shattered.

Cas crawled towards them, still slow from the drugs. "I'm not leaving you," he slurred, then fell against the wall. Alastair laughed, shoving Dean to the side and snatching up a syringe with a foul, cloudy liquid.

Dean grabbed him with all the force he could manage, which wasn't much with one useless arm and a body that had endured previously unimaginable abuse. His pathetic attempt wasn't enough to stop Alastair's forward movement—there was no way he could fight against the man's unhindered strength—so focused all his efforts on clinging to Alastair's arm and dropped, instead.

It worked. His dead weight pulled Alastair off balance and the two of them fell in a tangle. The syringe fell with a clatter, rolling off beyond Dean's reach. Most of Alastair's mass landed on Dean, who in turn landed on his destroyed shoulder and part of his back, but through the haze of pain he saw Cas start to slither away.

By the time Alastair kicked himself free of Dean and stood, Cas was gone.

Dean slumped against the ground, partly in relief and partly because he couldn't hold himself up anymore. Every nerve that hadn't been burnt to death screamed in agony. With a vicious, sneering smile, Alastair grabbed him by the broken arm and dragged him across the floor, back to the rack. Alastair strung him up again, humming to himself the whole time, though Dean couldn't much hear it over his own uncontrollable groans and shouts of pain.

Once satisfied with Dean's positioning, Alastair picked up a large knife from his table and pointed it at Dean didactically. "He's not going to get far. You can't possibly think I'm here alone."

"You're lying."

"That would be better, wouldn't it? You think you could die in peace if you knew he was safe?"

"There's no one else," Dean huffed through laboured breaths. "We woulda heard 'em, and no one's brought him back yet, so you can go fuck yourself."

"There's no convincing you, is there?" he sighed. Dean just stared at him, unflinching, waiting for what came next. "Fine. Congratulations. You saved your boy. I am so terribly disappointed in you, Dean."

"My heart bleeds."

"Oh, it will, but not yet. See, little Castiel's gone to get help, so I don't have time to move you properly—and that is just _such_ a shame. But it's gonna take him a while, since he can't hardly walk, and probably a while to find his way back, too. So we have some fun left to us yet, you and I."

Dean again lost track of time as Alastair's knife opened him up, long lines slicing down his legs and out his arms. Alastair narrated the entire time, explaining that he wasn't cutting too deeply because he didn't want Dean to lose too much blood—he didn't have much left to lose. It was more about building the pain than causing damage, and he could accomplish that in so many ways.

The warehouse door ricocheted open and Alastair didn't hesitate to slam the knife as far as it could go into Dean's gut, twisting with all his might. Dean thought he might have been screaming; his throat was so raw he couldn't tell anymore, but he heard something that might have been his voice. Gunshots blasted through the haze, louder than his pain for a few brief moments. Alastair still wore a satisfied grin when he fell in the pool of blood that was mostly Dean's.

Everything passed in flashes after that. Victor and Ash and Jo in ballistic vests. Gabriel and another medic he didn't recognize with their hands all over him, pressing and pulling and making things hurt more. Then he wasn't hanging on the rack anymore; he'd been moved to a stretcher with Gabriel nearly on top of him, holding pressure down on his stomach.

"I'm gonna need you to lie back, Dean-o, you're going into like twelve kinds of shock."

"No shit, Sherlock. How many thousands you still owe on that crack medical training?" Dean said. Or tried to say. He wasn't sure how much of it came out in recognizable syllables.

A blur appeared on his other side and he struggled to sit up when he saw it was Cas, being half-carried by Benny. It was against all kinds of protocols for him to be there—he should have been at the hospital getting checked out, shouldn't have been made or allowed to come back to the scene—but Dean was grateful to have one final moment with him.

"I love you," he choked out with his last, gasping breath. Cas's lined face and blue eyes faded into darkness.


	8. New Coat of Paint

The first month he spent recovering in the hospital was actually really easy for Dean, because he slept it away in a medically induced coma. He learned that after the fact, of course, and he was glad he hadn't had any way of knowing at the time; it reminded him too much of what had happened to Cas in Alastair's care. That said, he was also grateful that he hadn't been conscious for the worst of his burn treatments, because even when he awoke the pain was nearly more than he could take. Eventually they started tapering off the drugs, even allowed him visitors once it was determined his immune system could handle it.

Sam cried on him. A lot. Which was fine. Partly because he was so happy to see his brother again after being sure he was going to die that he really would have let Sam snot all over him for a year without getting sick of it. Also partly because he ended up crying on Sam a bit, too. Sam came to see him every single day for as long as the medical team allowed, which started out being less than an hour at a time, but grew longer as Dean regained his strength.

Thankful as Dean was for real human contact, his next two visitors weren't exactly who he'd have chosen, if given even a very short list of names. In fact, other than Sam, there was only one person Dean was really desperate to see. What he got instead was the brother. Who still kind of hated him.

"It's a good job you already look like shit, because I was fit to punch you again," was how Balthazar greeted Dean the moment he pushed into the room. "Still might," he added when Dean parted his lips to respond, so he snapped his mouth shut. "Liam bloody Neeson my arse."

"It wasn't your fault," Dean said when Balthazar didn't seem to have anything else to add. He didn't know how much information was out there yet, but he wanted to make sure that was part of it.

Balthazar waved him off. "Parts of it were, but we kind of figured out that wasn't all of it when I paid Roman off and neither of you came home."

Dean twisted a little too look more directly up at him—he still spent most of his time lying on his stomach, since the worst of the damage had been to his back—and immediately regretted it. There was still the little issue of his healing stab wound, and the disaster of skin on his back wasn't overly fond of stretching, either.

Wincing through the twinges of pain, he asked, "You paid him off?"

"Lafitte and I think your chief managed to hurry up the insurance money once, you know, you went _off the reservation_ and threw everyone into a tizzy. Didn't you say that was going to get him killed?"

If Balthazar was going to be a dick (which wasn't exactly a surprise), then Dean wasn't going to bother trying to watch his face. "I said _you_ doing that was going to get him killed."

In a strange place between amused and livid, Balthazar snorted. "Right. You doing it just got both of you _almost_ killed. You're clearly much more qualified than the trained group you talked me into trusting. I'm sure there's no way they could have brought my brother back before he had to endure a month of that hell."

The worst part for Dean was not knowing if that was true or not. When it was just Roman's scheme he was planning against, he figured he'd have a couple hours ahead of the cops and they'd clean up after him if needed. Alastair had been an unexpected variable, and while Dean thought anyone but him showing up would've meant death for Cas, he couldn't be sure.

But once he had found out Alastair was behind it, he'd done everything he could to get Cas out safely. And he'd succeeded. Cas was alive and mostly unharmed. At least, that's what people kept telling him. He hadn't seen it with his own eyes yet, and wouldn't believe it until he had. He could at least temper his guilt with that knowledge.

To Dean's great surprise, Balthazar acknowledged that before he could even bring it up. "All that aside, you... Thank you, Dean. Thank you for getting him back to me."

Balthazar's voice trembled, and Dean allowed them both the dignity of not twisting himself around to see the other man cry. Once Balthazar had composed himself, he rested a tentative hand on Dean's forearm, carefully on one of the few spots free of healing cuts, and said, "He'll visit when he can. It's just hard, right now."

Dean managed to wait until Balthazar had left to give in to his own tears.

"I didn't know they let you out of the special ward," he joked when Meg dropped by on her lunch break.

"They figured we should bond now, since you clearly belong in my neck of the woods. They're transferring you up as soon as you heal."

"Ha. See you in a year, then."

But she stayed, and despite Balthazar's doubts about her, she managed to bully him out of his morose moods whenever she stopped by.

When Chief Mills and Assistant Chief Turner appeared in his doorway, on the other hand, he knew it was all going to come crumbling down. It was worth it, he reminded himself as he braced to come clean. Most of it had probably already come out in the investigation anyway.

"I need to tell you something. A lot of things."

"No, you don't," Jody said. He blinked at her, thrown off his stride, and she flashed him secret smile. "Ash Miles did your background, kid. Did you really think he didn't find everything? We made a choice, and it was a hard damn decision, but he came to us with two files and we took the one that let you come work for us because you've been nothing but an excellent cop since you earned a badge. We're proud to have you and that's the last I'll hear of it."

"Oh."

" _Oh_ ," Rufus mocked with a snort. "Get back on your feet and we'll put you back to work, Winchester. We got enough to shut down R.R.E. for good, but Roman's in the wind and someone needs to track him down."

The heavy weight of impending doom Dean hadn't known he was living under lifted after that meeting. His life in Greenwood didn't have to be over. His career as a cop, likewise. It was more than he could have hoped for, certainly a hell of a lot more than he dared to expect. It was almost perfect, but only almost. And he only had himself to blame for what was missing.

Cas's first visit was a week after Balthazar's. "I'm sorry," he said, and, "I just needed some time," and Dean said, "Yeah, it's fine, I get it," even though his heart had broken a little more with each day. That was his fault, not Cas's, and he wouldn't hold it against him.

Cas visited regularly after that, almost as often as Sam. Some days the visits were silent, especially when Dean was having a bad day with pain and had to lean on his morphine button. Other times, they talked. About Dean's family and Cas's. About Alastair and Azazel and Mary Winchester. About Cas's physical therapy and how soon he could get back to work (a lot sooner than Dean, but not soon enough to suit him).

They didn't talk about the nightmares that kept Dean awake for days at a time, or the way he hadn't felt anything in his back since the fire. And it was another month, which saw Cas returning to duty and Dean still convalescing at the hospital, before they finally addressed what Dean had said at the warehouse.

"You said you loved me," Cas said as soon as he sat in the chair beside Dean. He didn't even have the decency to give Dean a chance to recover from that shock before barreling on. "I care for you very deeply as well, but there remain issues to be addressed. Our recent experience does not change that, nor should it. There were problems with our relationship, such as it was; problems with _us_."

"I know. God, Cas, I know I fucked up, but—"

Cas cut him off with a quick head shake and a gentle palm on his uninjured forearm. "The fault isn't your burden to bear alone, much as I may have placed it on you."

Turned out laughing bitterly hurt just as much as the normal kind. "How's that, exactly? I didn't walk in on you fucking my brother in my own bed, not that it would have been okay without the location or the witnessing. And I know I said a lotta shit, made my excuses, but the truth is: whatever we had or hadn't talked about, I knew it was a violation. I knew it was a shitty thing to do to you and that's why I did it."

"It was," Cas agreed. "It was a shitty and manipulative response to a shitty, manipulative situation, and that part is my fault." Before Dean could ask the obvious question, he looked away and confessed, "I knew what Anna was going to do."

"So it was what, a setup? You get your sister to seduce me as some kinda test?" Dean's voice came out strangled, halfway between disbelief and anger, and Cas whipped back around with wide, fearful eyes.

"No! Well, not how you mean, quite, though I suppose it doesn't make a difference. A setup, test—yes. But not coordinated. She didn't do it because I asked her, she did it because she wanted to hurt me. I'm perfectly aware of what sort of person my sister is, Dean, just how much she despises me and what she's willing to do for that hatred. But I left you alone with her with no forewarning because I wanted to prove something to myself."

Cas was right, it wasn't really better than the two of them planning it, but it still almost made sense except for one thing: "Did you want to prove that I wouldn't, or that I would?"

"I don't know." A restless, abortive gesture of indecipherable intent accompanied the quiet response, and Castiel fixed his gaze on the hands now clenched in his lap. "That's a large part of what I need to resolve for myself before I can consider myself suitable as a potential partner. At the start, I was so convinced that I didn't want you to get attached, that I didn't want to get attached, that when I did—and I think it's clear that I did—I think it was too late for it to work out. We went about this all wrong, I think."

"For what it's worth, I got attached, too. Fucked up way of showing it, I know, but..."

He trailed off and they sat in silence, something tremulous and delicate between them that Dean feared would shatter if he even breathed. Trust, maybe—not the easy physical intimacy they shared before, but a more vulnerably honest connection.

"Beyond that... I am not a whole person, Dean." Dean wanted to protest, mostly involving some particularly rude comments about Cas's mother, but he was preempted when the man continued. "Regardless of the origin of my emotional inadequacies, I'm not what most people would consider 'well adjusted.' You deserve better than that in a partner, and I owe it to myself to be comfortable in my own feelings before I complicate matters with a significant relationship."

"I don't deserve shit," Dean argued, "but you do. And I want—whatever you need. I'd like to see if we can be something better this time, but only if it's what you want."

"I think I'd like that, too. But we went about this whole thing wrong."

He shouldn't get his hopes up. He already had more than he deserved waiting for him after everything he'd done in his life, and even after everything he'd done in Greenwood. But Dean still had to try, because as far as he could tell, Cas was everything he'd ever wanted.

"So let me try it the right way. Please."

"How?"

"Dinner, when I get out of here. You and me, somewhere nice—public, no pressure for anything, just to talk. Maybe we can go out with Sammy after. Even if we're not gonna work out, I think it'd be nice to have a proper introduction, you know?"

Crimson stained Dean's face because he knew it was too little, too late, but Cas smiled. It was small, just turning up the corners of his mouth, but his eyes crinkled with its sincerity.

"I do know. That sounds perfect."

Their first date was on a Friday. Dean was out of the hospital, back at work, but still on light duty; probably would be for at least six more months. His physical therapy appointments had been scaled back to twice a week, and even so, the second was mostly an attempt to prevent him from pushing himself too hard the other days when he goes to the gym. He was skipping the workout tonight, though, in favor of pacing nervously around his apartment and constantly changing his shirt. He called Sam five times and got hung up on the last three.

"You already know he likes you," Sam said on the final call, "and you can't fuck it up worse than you already did. Just be yourself, that's what worked before."

"Until I fucked it up," Dean pointed out bitterly.

"That was you trying not to be yourself. Stop calling me."

The first time a date led back to Dean's apartment was also a Friday. It was the same Friday, actually, but no one was really keeping track. Things were going well—better than Dean maybe had had a right to expect, but then Sam had to be right sometimes—until Cas, half-pinned against the bed below him, slid both hands under Dean's shirt. In the frozen moment before Dean jerked away to sit up, Castiel was already pushing forward and wrapping tight arms around his torso, over the cloth this time.

"It's all right, Dean," he soothed, but there was no pity in it, no apology, just calm assertion. Dean would've had to leave if there'd been pity, and since it was his bed, that would have been awkward. "What do you want to do?"

Dean let a dry chuckle escape past Cas's ear then dropped his forehead to the unreasonably comforting shoulder offered beneath it. "I want to go back to Christmas," he could only confess with his eyes pressed to the dark blue shirt, shutting out the rest of the world. "I want this to be easy again. I want to be able to touch you without feeling like the lowest slime defiling something holy. I want to look at you and not spend the whole time thinking that you're looking back and seeing all the fucked up parts. I want to feel it when you touch me," he choked, biting his lips together to hold back a sob. He shuddered once, muscles contracting in a spasm, then pulled himself together with a deep breath and leaned back.

"So I'm a bit of a mess," he concluded, meeting Cas's eyes with a shaky smile, "But mostly I want to get it right this time."

In his quietly brilliant way, Cas focused on the least fraught topic, running his left hand gently over Dean's back through the fabric. "The nerves...?"

"The burns were, well, you know. Deep. Uh, full thickness. The skin that's left was too damaged, and the grafts... They say there's still hope, but statistically it's pretty unlikely that I'll get sensation back if there's nothing there yet."

"I'm sorry, Dean."

"It's fine," Dean said automatically, then laughed a bit. "I mean, it's not, obviously, but. I'm not looking for pity, I just—"

"It's not pity," Cas interrupted, surprisingly fervent. "I was there. I was the _reason_ you were there. I watched it all and I couldn't do anything to stop it. I couldn't help you. I have nightmares where you never stop—" He broke off, so Dean didn't know if he was going to say _bleeding_ or _burning_ or _screaming_ , but it hardly made a difference; Dean himself still dreamed of all three.

They didn't have sex that night. The air was too heavy with grief and guilt. But they spent the night together in constant contact, waking from their individual nightmares to find each other alive, healing if not whole, and it helped.


	9. The Heart of Saturday Night

They got married in a cabin in the mountains one December. It was a small ceremony, just family—which didn't start or end with blood. Anna and Michael didn't attend; she made some excuse about filming her latest project, and he just called Castiel an abomination. But Balthazar was there, and Sam with a very pregnant Jess. Each was best man to his brother, with Benny and Jo—Bobby let it be known he was too old for that shit before Dean could even ask—filling out Dean's side and Meg and Gabriel standing with Cas.

They met at the front when the ceremony began, because despite Dean's threats to make Bobby walk him down the aisle, they didn't really think anyone ought to be giving them away. They hadn't made it to where they were alone, but they were grown goddamn men and didn't belong to anyone else. And Cas didn't have a surrogate parent in his life like Dean did, even if Bobby and Ellen had more or less adopted him by then.

Ellen, Sam, and Jo all teared up as they exchanged their vows, but it was Bobby who sobbed silently into his beard at the final "I do."

The formalities were short: everyone knew it was all about the after-party. The officiant was a pastor called Jim, an old friend of Bobby's who'd overseen the man's own wedding, but he had no objections leading a ceremony that had no religious overtones to it. Cas had struggled some with that decision, because his relationship with God wa complicated by everything he'd been through in the name of religion, but there was still _something_ there.

Jim had taken Cas aside in the early stages of planning to talk it over. Not that the planning had many stages; they'd spent long enough just to get to their engagement that they wanted it over quickly. Their conversation had lasted for hours, and Cas seemed lighter for it. The secularism of their wedding had been his choice after that, since Dean didn't feel strongly either way. He didn't believe in any of it, but he wouldn't have minded as long as he still got to put his ring on Cas's finger and to wear Cas's on his.

"Our relationship, our marriage, is about us. Not God," Cas told him by way of explaining his decision. It therefore came as a surprise to Dean that, rather than turning further away from organized religion with that sentiment, Cas started attending Sunday services at Pastor Jim's church. Not always, especially given his work schedule, but regularly enough. He invited but didn't pressure Dean, staunchly atheist since the age of four, who declined. It was never a problem for them.

After they exchanged vows and plain titanium rings—gold wasn't to Dean's taste, and they both worked jobs that the soft metal would never stand up to—Pastor Jim introduced them as Mr. Dean Winchester and Mr. Castiel Novak. Names didn't make you family and neither of them could be bothered to do all the paperwork that would have come with changing theirs. Dean and Cas shared their first dance to Zep's _Thank You_ —which was the absolute girliest Dean's wedding song was allowed to be—with no one really leading because all they did was sway softly together, whispering and smiling and staring.

Then Cas sat down while Dean made a fool of himself with Jo and Jess and even Meg, who was pouting after she failed to drag Cas back to the floor. She soon settled her vice-like grip around Inias, twining around the uncomfortable man and pausing only to ask, voice husky with suggestion, if he remembered her brother Tom.

It would be years before Cas and Michael spoke again, but it would happen on Lucien's birthday, after he'd been missing for over three decades. Michael would be the one to break the silence with an early-morning phone call full of regret and grief. "I miss him so much," he'd whisper between shuddering breaths, "And I'll never know what happened. I can't stand that I've lost you and Balthazar when you're right here. I know it's my fault, but I swear I'll do better. I've been talking to some people, there's a group..."

Progress and reconciliation would come slowly, but they would come. Dean would finally make the trip with Cas and Balthazar to Michael's house and be welcomed warmly, if a little uncertainly. Michael would even come to Greenwood and stay with Balthazar, who then tended to escape his own home in favour of Cas's, because while the love between brothers would be remembered, so would the constant irritations.

And every year, sometimes but not always on their anniversary, they'd find time to go over to Seattle and have a few (or more than a few) drinks at Panthers, the bar where it all began. Sometimes they would even stumble over to the same sketchy motel, just to relive the memories.


End file.
